Desktops forum: Poll: When my computer is not in use, it is usually:

I only do it that way because the sleep mode never works properly for me. It is a win 7 64 system. My theory on it is the number of drives connected to it, each with it's own idea of what to do when waking, so I shut off my monitors and let it idle.

I never turn my desktop nor my two laptops off. The desktop goes to sleep so I can be back on in less than 10 seconds. Same for the work laptop. My personal laptop sleeps for 2 hours and then hibernates since I use it less often and don't want to be greeted with a dead battery.

Personally I think that the wear and tear on the hard drive(s) is far more for a complete boot-up from start, than from sleep mode, and the sudden power surge to all the components from a cold start is far more wear and tear on the computer in general from a cold boot-up rather than from 'sleep' mode. It is not just a wait longer or shorter issue or power drain on the electricity.
Think of dimming down the incandescent light bulb filament with a dimmer to night light level, or even slightly from full bright and gradually increasing it's brightness, as opposed to an instand on and off with a light switch. I assure you that bulb will last far longer with the dimmer under full bright setting than with full power applied to it instantly and jarring the filament into occilation. Same thing applies to the components in your PC, TV or any other electronic apparatus.

>) Why waste electricity leaving it on, even in sleep or hibernate mode?
Really, how lazy and selfish can we be to not shut down our computers
overnight?<

You presume there are only 'right' and 'wrong' answers, and you are, of course right. What if I were to tell you that for those pennies you say are wasted, you can help fight many of the scourges of the third word, and help fight the hemorrhagic and tropical diseases which are moving north as a consequence of climate change? Would I still be 'lazy and selfish' if I joined a team everynight when I retired and worked all night long looking for a better way to produce clean water, how to get more power to store in a battery, ow to make a photo-voltaic cell produce more bang per buck, and pointed you directly to the cure of Malaria, handed you a way to cure generic influenza, or (as we did) find a way to put usable vitamin A into corn to keep HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of children from going blind EVERY YEAR? -- sounds selfish to turn your machine OFF doesn't it? How answer thee?

Very simple, I cannot get out from sleep or hibernate mode without a hard shut down ( only remedy would be possibly re installing the OS which I do not feel like doing) so those options are not available for me anyway. If I expect to use the machine within 2 hours, I leave it idle, otherwise it is shut down in order to save energy and other reasons.

During the day time my windows 7 machine is put in "Sleep Mode". Before I go to bed I shut it off completely. My HDMI monitor has its own sleep mode and HP recommends it control it's own sleep mode (day and night). I've used an amp monitor and it doesn't even use 2 amp per hour and I just let it go to sleep at it owns schedule.

If I'm going somewhere for several hours I turn off my computer. Otherwise I leave it on, letting the screen saver look for extraterrestrial life (SETI).

In the morning I turn on the computer and after using it is sleeping because for me is the fastest way of booting again, but at the end of the day or when I'm not at home for more than 4 hours I use to turn it off.

Three reasons.

One, my machine automatically collects email -- I receive a lot of legitimate emails every day and my machine is able to file some, respond to some and put the rest in my Inbox for my perusal. I do not have to wait for it when it starts up but can just start work.

Second, my machine performs its nightly backup at three AM -- this can be anything from a five minute process to much longer.

Third, mandatory and important updates are performed right after the backup finishes. Again some of these can be quite long -- if this hapened when I turned on the machine, many of them would be postponed -- and the postponements would accumulate. This could be especially bad for the virus file updates.

When my machine is idling, it uses more juice that sleeping, hibernating or off but these tasks would not get done in a timely manner. The display shuts down -- uses almost no juice. The hard drives stop spinning when they are not needed and the fans shut down because they are not needed either.

I disagree with the person who said below that a clean reboot is needed quite often. Since the days of XP, my machine only reboots when an update requires it for completion of installation. This too is done while I am away.

Back in the much earlier days of an unruly MS SQL server, I used to advise clients to ensure they rebooted that machine once per week. If not the scratch space would gorw and eventually bring the server to a non-responsive state. This has long ago been corrected. Unless you have truly bad applications, you should not need a scheduled reboot. In a data center environment, you need to put some controls on the processing of updates and maybe -- this could then control when you need a restart.

Saving electricity is perhaps a valid reason for shutting down. If your machine is not doing anything useful when you are not at the controls, by all means, why not shut it down? If you need it to be responsive right away when you sit down, you may do better if you can set up processes to take care of the maintenance tasks when you are not there. If you have time to wait when your machine starts up (maybe 5 minutes, maybe a half an hour or more) why not shut it down. If you don't install the updates when required, you may be risking a lot for a little time and electricity. It is your choice.

You are right -- the later OS's did not require it but as I mentioned above, old versions of MS SQL did.

Do you listen to yourself?

You must be on a Terabyte Network link. My updates takemuch longer that 12 seconds to download -- installation time is minimal by comparison.

You did not mention daily backups -- they take me from 5 minutes to many times that (depending on how active I have been the previous day). Yes, having SSD all around would speed this up somewhat.

How about cost? To implement SSD on my machines would require about 15 TB of it in two 7.5 TB bundles for backups plus about 5 TB for individual machines. I do not want to sell my house to buy this stuff. Maybe someday it will be priced at a satisfacory level.

I did not mention the major database updates that can occur when I am away by my merely staging the data. No matter what the drive speed, I would not like waiting for these either.

Please do not assume that a SSD solution that works for you will work for everyone. I looked at it. It will not work for me for several reasons.

.T.

I have to use the Moon button on my keyboard rather than shut down (which I would prefer to save electricity), because when I do a shut down or reboot I always get a "Warning; intuder detected" so a reset is necessary to bypass that. If I use the keyboard button (which sounds like a shut down, since computer is silent) I rarely have this problem. All else works fine, so I will leave it that way.

I can't help but think this scenario is similar to hybrid cars, with the only thing really being accomplished is their owners' ability to feign moral high ground over their peers, that they care more about the planet than anyone else does on superficial glance- yet when one factors in the more complex vehicle taking more energy to manufacture, a shorter life span, and the toxic processes involved at every stage of the storage batteries' life- it's far less green than any more humble economy car.
It's hard to comprehend what numbers they might be crunching toward "solving" climate change in this global network of dinosaur computers you describe which could offset the energy used by such old, inefficient PC's and the increased network usage needed to tie them together. It doesn't take a Cray supercomputer to come up with the most obvious problem threatening the planet:
Global Socialist leftists masquerading their agenda as Environmentalism or casually switching between the two. As climate change is purportedly caused by human industrial activity, it is incomprehensible they (and you from your statements) cannot see that raising the living standard of billions in the third world- industrializing them- is only putting the peril of climate change on a fast track of doom. The evidence is already clear, since the inception of Kyoto, total global GGE have soared, and the rate of increase has soared. The trend is led by countries like China and India while the US is levelling off. Never mind "trans and multi-national corporations" are exploiting gullible pollyannas of the left and their global socialist policies to destroy the planet and further spread traditional pollution they can't get away with here AND cost Americans jobs.
But I suppose that matters less to you than being smug and telling yourself you made a difference, like European activists who pushed a quick ban through the EU to ban single hulled tankers from their ports to prevent a Valdez disaster in their waters. Good job, guys! This short sighted policy which didn't consider the consequences of making 2500 hulls obsolete virtually overnight caused a thousand REAL disasters, called "shipbreaking".
500,000 years of calculations are not going to end the bottomless pit of suffering called Africa, while the factors of hunger and disease are more mired in faulty ancient religions, warlord ruled feifdoms, willful ignorance of simple birth control, and corrupt governments than they are western capitalists.
I'll finally note the irony of bashing capitalism, while typing on a PC which surely would not even exist without the free enterprise and technology this economic system made possible.

I prefer it that way, because it's pretty hands off, the computer does it automatically, and the computer doesn't have to do a full boot up.

I all ways shut my computer off @ home. For two reasons. 1: I'm not using it and 2: its a wasteful use power (electricity)