Windows 7 Embedded Standard: Do you need to shut it down?

Question

I realise that this may be a silly question, and for that I apologise in advance...

I am developing an application that is going to run on a Windows 7 Embedded Standard device installed in a vehicle. As things currently stand, the device is powered off with the ignition however I am not sure that this is ideal as it means that there is no graceful shutdown.

I have been looking around the web and I cannot find anything that indicates whether Windows 7 Embedded Standard is a special case that does not require a graceful shutdown or whether I have just been lucky to date as I have never seen any "Windows was not shut down properly" messages or anything else to indicate that simply pulling the power has caused any problems. My gut feel (and that of my colleagues) is that we should be performing a graceful shutdown before powering off the device but it would be nice to have some evidence to base that upon.

Can anybody enlighten me here?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, we also use WES7 with ungracefull shutdowns, but we are protected from anything.

Have you heard about Enhanced Write Filter ? EWF is a program that prevents any modifications made to the Drive where Windows is installed. It actually writes any change made into the RAM so all these changes are discarded upon reboot.

This has a side effect: on reboot, Windows will not detect it has been shut down ungracefully.

This program is available in the ICE as a package (if I remember).