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    "Then, when the computer starts up, it sees the virtual memory has the data from the 38 pages of the document that was opened in a word processor." - it won't care, it will treat this as garbage data and not use it until it's overwritten it. (Because what would you expect to be there? It's never going to be anything useful)
    – Stack Exchange Supports Israel
    Commented Mar 10, 2016 at 3:24
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    "it won't care, it will treat this as garbage" -- right. That's why my very next sentence (after the one you quoted) said, "The computer doesn't even know that the data was being used by a word processor." It lost track of that fact.
    – TOOGAM
    Commented Mar 10, 2016 at 4:38
  • What I mean is that that doesn't cause any problems.
    – Stack Exchange Supports Israel
    Commented Mar 10, 2016 at 10:13
  • "Most modern operating systems are designed ... easier to design with such a requirement". IMO this is an oversimplification. We can avoid shutdowns, but at very expensive cost. No caching, no way for background processes (servers, backup managers, updates) to be notified. Also modern hardware is no more used with PIO but with DMA, you tell the HDD and NIC to read data from RAM and they notify you when done. What if the power got lost in between the HDD is writing from its cache to its plates? Let the OS decide how much to delay the shutdown. It knows better.
    – Margaret Bloom
    Commented Mar 10, 2016 at 11:27