leaving it on?
Michael T. Biehl
Is it best to leave your pc on all the time or just turn it on
when you need it then turn it off. Reason I ask is becouse I
heard that every time you turn your pc on and off you lose
a day of its life.
Dean Cording
The best option is to turn it on when you need it and turn it off
when you think you won't need it for a while. That is, if you need
it now for 5 minutes and possibly in an hour or so then leave it on,
but if you won't need it until tommorrow then turn it off.
At our site we have investigated this problem. We have about 100 machines
over 18 months old - half of which have rarely been turned off in that time.
Last summer the building staff insisted on turning off all machines over the
weekend. Almost all of the monitors that had been left on continuously
failed within a week with blown power supplies. The other monitors were
unaffected. There did not appear to be any problem with the machines.
Considering that the life of a machine is nearly 20 years turning the
machine on and off every day will only reduce this to 10 years, if
what you say holds, I don't think it will cause you any problems.
Basically, you can leave a machine on continously or you can switch it
on and off everyday, but doing both will cause problems.
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Dean Cording
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Hymie!
cor...@sorokin.anu.edu.au (Dean Cording) writes:
>bs...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Michael T. Biehl) writes:
>
>
>>Is it best to leave your pc on all the time or just turn it on
>>when you need it then turn it off. Reason I ask is becouse I
>>heard that every time you turn your pc on and off you lose
>>a day of its life.
>
>The best option is to turn it on when you need it and turn it off
>when you think you won't need it for a while. That is, if you need
>it now for 5 minutes and possibly in an hour or so then leave it on,
>but if you won't need it until tommorrow then turn it off.
don't necessarily take this advice as gospel.
i have a seagate (?) hard drive, and i (and other people who mentioned
this the last time this question came up) have to leave the thing on all
the time. if i turn it off, it takes a lot of fiddling with the wires
to get it to turn back on. in fact, i'll be on vacation for a week, and
the thing will be on the whole time.
i live in fear of a power outage. :)
--hymie
hymo...@cs.jhu.edu hy...@jhuvms.bitnet
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I am godlike... except that he's perfect, and I fuck up all the time.
That would be the only real difference between us. --Andy Breckman
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peter da silva
so. I turn off boxes containing moving parts (disk drives) when I won't be
using them for a day or so.
I also try to make efficient use of my resources, which means not using
doggy software and then buying a 386/33 and 16M of RAM to make up for it.
No X-Windows, no Microsoft or IBM operating systems. AmigaOS, UNIX, MGR.
Reddy Kilowatt says: save power, don't do DOS.
--
Peter da Silva / 77487-5012 USA / +1 713 274 5180
true(<<VV$@\\$'&O 9$O%'$LT$&$"V6"$&$<4$?'&$ #I&&?$=$<<@)24 24 scale 3 21 moveto
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Stewart Rowe
Here is an item extracted from the Washington Post which may interest you.
The EPA is trying to promote energy-efficient personal computers.
A single PC doesn't use much electricity. You can keep
your home computer turned on around the clock for a month and barely notice the
difference when the electric bill comes around. But with personal computers now
humming away in tens of millions of offices and tens of millions of homes, the
EPA started counting kilowatts and came up with a striking conclusion.
The agency released figures earlier this year suggesting that personal
computers account for 5 percent of the total commercial electricity consumption
in the United States; with computer use spreading like crazy, the figure was
projected to rise to 10 percent by the end of the decade.
When you start talking about 5 percent or 10 percent of all U.S.
electricity, you're counting an awful lot of kilowatts. So the EPA, working with
computer, chip and software makers, has promoted "green computing" as a way to
save energy and reduce air pollution at home.
The EPA's analysis is based on the thesis - which sounds right - that most
people leave their desktop PCs turned on all the time. But those machines are
actually used only about 20 percent to 30 percent of the time. So if the
computer could be designed to switch automatically to a low-power "sleep" mode
when not in use, there could be significant savings in power consumption.
Robert Wiegand
>Here is an item extracted from the Washington Post which may interest you.
>
> The EPA is trying to promote energy-efficient personal computers.
> A single PC doesn't use much electricity. You can keep
>your home computer turned on around the clock for a month and barely notice the
>difference when the electric bill comes around. But with personal computers now
>humming away in tens of millions of offices and tens of millions of homes, the
>EPA started counting kilowatts and came up with a striking conclusion.
> The agency released figures earlier this year suggesting that personal
>computers account for 5 percent of the total commercial electricity consumption
>in the United States; with computer use spreading like crazy, the figure was
>projected to rise to 10 percent by the end of the decade.
[Stuff deleted]
I'm surprised that the number is that high.
I have also heared about another problem PCs cause due to the switched power
supplies used in them. A switched supply draws a constant power from the
power input. The power used by a normal resistive load will depend on
the voltage. During peak power usage the power company will sometimes
drop the voltage to reduce the amount of power they must produce.
Nice loads like light-bulbs will reduce their power usage as the voltage
drops. PCs just suck more current to make up for the voltage drop.
The power company doesn't like PCs. :-)
--
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Robert Wiegand - Motorola Inc.
motcid!wie...@uunet.uu.net uunet!motcid!wiegand
Disclamer: I didn't do it - I was somewhere else at the time.