The support case of a customer who said that all they could see was a black screen

This article discusses a safety feature in PCs that allows users to force a shutdown by holding the power button, and the implications of this action on kernel dumps and black screen failures. It provides insights into the analysis of such failures and the potential causes behind them.

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If you hold a PC’s power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This is a safety feature so that you can turn of the computer even if the operating system’s “Shut down” command isn’t working.

After eight seconds of the power button being held down, the Windows kernel realizes that the user is trying to do a force-power-off of the system, and it quickly takes a kernel dump that can be uploaded to the Windows Error Reporting service the next time you turn the system on. (Sometimes four seconds isn’t enough time to get enough information, and the kernel dump is incomplete. I believe that on Windows Insider builds of Windows, you get a message that says something like “Please let go of the power button so we can collect more…

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