What Should the Default Action of Hitting a Power Button Be?

While working on a couple of projects on my PC last week, one of my cats decided it’d be as good a time as any to hop up onto the chassis and rest his foot on the power button. The chassis I use, Cooler Master’s CM Storm Sniper, is quite good in many ways, but if I could change one thing, it’d be the top-mounted power button. Not long after the cat jumped up on the PC, it was turned off… and some work was lost.

This shutdown wasn’t instant, because the power button was simply pushed, not held down. By default, Windows Vista/7 (and perhaps XP) will go into sleep mode when the power button is pushed, and then come back out of it by hitting a key on your mouse or keyboard, or by pushing the power button again. For me, there was no recovery… Windows just didn’t come back to – which pretty much sums up most of my experiences with Windows.

Because I keep this PC on 24/7, I rarely ever use that power button except to turn the PC on, so once I was back in Linux, I decided to hit it and see what happened. You can see the result below… a prompt that asks what you want to do. Hit the power button by mistake? No worries, just cancel this dialog. On Windows, there’s no asking… there’s just doing. In asking our Mac-loving editor Brett, he could also confirm that OS X works the same as Linux in this regard.

To be fair to Windows, you can configure the power button to do a couple of different things, including raising a prompt like the one below, but the fact that the default option is to put the PC into sleep mode boggles my mind. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ever hit that button (ahem, had a cat hit that button) before, and when it happens, it’s frustrating.

Windows continues to have this function, however, so I’m curious to know just how popular it is for people to put their PC into sleep mode, in lieu of a full shutdown. And either way, what would you guys prefer the default action to be? Sleep mode as it is today, or a prompt a la Mac and Linux?