If I were to hold down the power button and choke my PC to death, what damage in any of the parts will happen? Will the hard drive screw up because it was writing something? What will happen?
1 Answer
There isn't much in the way of physical damage that goes on. You may have to worry about disk corruption, amongst other things of this nature, assuming you had anything running that was utilizing any kind of I/O. There is also the obvious concern that you lose any contents in memory, such as open documents, games, or browsers.
As technology has developed, the hardware has simply been manufactured to take this kind of punishment. Generally a hard shutdown doesn't hurt components. However, power fluctuations can (at fault of your energy provider), though that is outside of the scope of the question.
Possible duplicate: Can a power failure or forceful shutdown damage hardware?