In a Hurry to Turn Off Your Laptop?

Sometimes a laptop computer can take well over a minute to shut down by the standard method of clicking on start - Shut Down - Shut Down, or however you do the same thing through the pull-down menus on a Mac.

Sometimes, like when the time to end one course lecture and start another (with a different computer hooked up) is very limited, you just don't have a minute to spare.

So all you need to do is hold down the main power button (the same one you use to turn your laptop on) for about 5-10 seconds and you're done.

This is especially fun on Windows machines if you leave all your applications running when you hold the button down. The computer "frantically" (excuse my anthropomorphosis) starts quitting applications and closing windows before suddenly going blank.

You can do this on your desktop machine too, but I can't figure out why you'd need to hurry like this with a desktop.