There are 2 kinds of boot on a machine.

1) a soft boot - normally its called "restart"

2) a hard boot - normally the machine has been turned all the way off for at least 30 seconds.

Turning it on for the first time in a sequence is called "booting up"


Turning the machine off is best done through the software. Then press the button to restart it.

Be aware that a hard boot can damage your system files cause windows dowsn't always write to them until time to shut down. That's why when your PC goes out from a power failure (accidental hard boot) it sometimes becomes corrupt. Only hard boot if your machine freezes in a game or similar and you can't get out anotherway (crtl + alt + del and then shut down or restart, or hitting the windows key to get to the desktop or crtl + esc in some cases). Just like pulling a usb drive out with out selecting safely remove, hard booting a drive can mess it up.