Is Force Quitting Bad?

Question

Approximately 20% of the time My MB pro can't be awakened from sleep mode. Screen stays black regardless of what I do. So, To get my Pro going again I must force quit it using the power button, then restart. All's well then.
Is it true that force quitting with the power button is hard on the machine? Could it cause problems down the road?
I'd take it to an Apple genius bar to get the sleep issue resolved but the anomaly can't be reproduced at will.

Answer 1

"Force Quitting" is not a bad thing, but that's not what you're doing. A Force Quit is when you exit an application that's not responding (Apple menu > Force Quit or keyboard shortcut).
What you are doing is a forced shut down. That can cause problems down the road, because forced shut downs can cause damage to the directory structure of the hard drive. You can check that in Utilities > Disk Utility by clicking Verify Disk. Usually, Disk Utility can repair the problems (you need to boot from the Install DVD or an external drive to do that), but sometimes a more powerful 3rd party utility, Disk Warrior, is needed. Directory damage doesn't happen every time, or even all that frequently, but forced shutdowns do increase the likelihood.
So, your best bet is to get to the root of the problem, if you can.
One question - when you close the lid, do you wait for a little while for the MBP to actually go to sleep? Look at the light on the lid latch - while that light is on steadily, the MBP is writing the contents of RAM to the hard disk (Safe Sleep). The MBP is only asleep after that's done, and the light starts pulsating. If you just close the lid, grab your MBP and take off you may interrupt the process by triggering the sudden motion sensor on the hard drive. That is one common cause of sleep/wake issues.