should we REALLY turn pc's off at night? I don't think so.

I noticed instant drive failures when the drives were below 45 F and powered up in 2000. I believe the failure mode was thick lubricant on the spindle preventing the drive from spinning up before the heads were extended. Drive dissection revealed the source of the screech to be scraped magnetic coating from the disc.

I'd had a few drives fail earlier on power up at ~50 but the screeching of the last one was a reason to dig into it (and it was out of warranty).

I don't know if drives have improved - now I preheat the computer box with a light bulb for an hour before I turn it on if the temperature is 50 or below, or just leave it running if the temperature is expected to go down.

Power supply? ATX with APM and software control - replaced in 2004. MOBO has two power connectors for pre 2000 and post 2000 supplies.

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I have a cable modem with an "off" button.

Correct me if I'm wrong... 3 amps*120 volts = 360 watts??

Maybe that's the maximum power which can be drawn, but I'd certainly notice if a desktop in my home were cooking like that. I think you're about an order of magnitude off for a modern machine in standby.

At least up to lightning strikes.

That had occured to me.

Most people peck it in before compilation but you write it down longhand and compile it from hardcopy. No wonder they call you boy genius.

Ahh, insults from a single helix fellow. It figures though.

You must live in a cold climate and/or an unheated computer room.

Get an O-scope and look at the power supply voltages at start-up. They should gently ramp up over several seconds, without any spikes.

Computers for chicks?

LOL Speak for yourself stupid. You said you wrote it down on paper and now you say you pecked it in through an interface cable. If you have to keep making shit up, it's apparent you have no clue since you've strayed form the original subject trying to be clever. It's pretty obvious you never understood the original statement of resurrecting old data in the first place.

Mmmm, yes. Your critical scientific thinking seems to center around creationism, bibles, God and other religous subjects. Single helix folks occassionaly have such problems but you seem obsessed with it. Pity

Relatively unheated room

I did that some time ago - ramp up (exponential curve) in about 100 milliseconds with no over shoot - this newer supply is fussy about power too. I used to be able to switch the amplified speaker on and off with a toggle switch - the computer shuts off, or did, when powering up the speakers.

A resistor capacitor snubber across the switch fixed that - but I have to avoid using that outlet for power supplies - heaters OK - hot glue gun, soldering iron, but no linear supplies.

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squidgee squidgee babok babok The great clown says "use XPs Hibernate!"

This is 50 times or more too fast.

Laser printers are "not that bad anymore" primarily because most have power-management features which will power down the fuser, etc., when the printer has been idle for a while. That was the point, though - to make sure that your printers DO have such features, and that they remain enabled.

A "screen saver" prevents the processor from idling only if it is of the type that puts a moving image on the screen as opposed to shutting the video (and syncs) down. There's no reason to use such things any more - a "screen saver" function should cause the display to at least enter a standby or suspend state after a sufficiently long (more than 10-20 minutes, say) idle period.

Bob M.

You mean you do not know how to add.

"One computer left on all day results in the emission of 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide in a year. It would take 100 to 500 trees to absorb that amount of extra carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. "

Turn off the computers stooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopid

Mike

At work my AV software is updated on a local server overnight and I get a message when I log on to accept the update. Backups are not my concern as that is a server issue (no data saved to local drive)

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That doesn't sound believable. You state seconds to come up? A second is a very long time, eons to a computer. Your fans take 5 seconds to spin up? Mine are running at full bore

chance

In my admittedly limited experience, computers go obsolete long before the hard drive fails. My theory is that if you turn *off* the machines for evenings and weekends, your $1.27 Chinese-built switch-mode power supply is only aboout 35% as likely to catch fire.

Bill

US residents use 50 times the power used by people of India. This is because they are all allowed with cheap power and dirt cheap fuel oil & gas which generates the electricity. Also these people are so lazy that they find it difficult to switch off PC in orderly manner ( who to wait those 10 seconds for getting the " OK to shut down" message) If PC is hibernate mode then still it consumes more than 25Watts. With monitor on alongwith it consumes 50watts. Then there is real waste of

600WattHours. Not to mention about minllions who keep everything on with 250 x 12 = 3 KWHrs apprx. No doubt that western countries are generating those gases which are hotting up the environment. Only poor and developing countries are suffering due to this. People get shock once in a while with KATRINA but forget next day. Indian people suffer power cuts twice a day and they value their PCs much more than anything. Except for poor shutdown and start there is not much worse problem with PC. I shut down PC atleast 5 times a day. I am using old model of P3-800Mhz for last 4years. So why are U all cribbing with any effect on PC? purushottam

Actually, I'm finding a lot of people who think that coding never involves typing. This myth is spreading. It's bothersome...especially when the people who argue with you are arguing by typing the characters in. It's another small irony of computing life.

/BAH

During this period the computer's clock does not run.

This is way way too fast!

Yep.

This is very important. Years ago, to lay a claim to be the first to produce the next higher density memory chips, (If my memory serves me, 16K or 64K.) IBM produced a 4 voltage chip. Products that used it were quickly withdrawn, because no one had a power supply that brought all the voltages up in the right order.

The first PROMs had three voltages, they were almost as impractical. The first two voltage PROMs sold like morning hotcakes at a working man's diner.

The first transistor computers, the second generation, came with large motor-flywheel-generator sets which guaranteed that voltages ramped up and down. The flywheels of the big mainframes were huge, weighing hundreds of pounds. They often had to be located in the basement of buildings, because the upper floors of buildings were not strong enough to carry them. Many remained there, long after the computers they powered were obsolete, because one had to tear down the buildings they were in to remove them.

I remember seeing one of those in the basement of the IBM research campus around Mohegan Lake, NY. I think it had a diesel coupled to it so it could transfer to generator power seamlessly. IBM was the cutting edge back then.

I worked in the Navy where our hard drives were 1/4" thick 8" wide belts of magnetic medium ferrite/Hypalon on huge aluminum drums with

64 heads separated by a film of silicone oil. Scratch pad memory was magnetostrictive delay lines, and ram was discrete (transistor) flip flops. Archival storage was 14 channel 60 IPS 1" tape with a 100 KHZ bandwidth per channel. We had this "line printer" that weighed tons - had miniature drive chains with characters on each link. The clutches would stop the chains at the appropriate letters and a platen would come up and slap the paper into the ribbon and characters. Bam, bam bam, line at a time. Made a racket and was surrounded by safety shields and a safety zone - in case some mechanical part came off.

About the ramp up - milliseconds makes a lot more sense than seconds. Think about it for a bit. These are digital circuits - a slow ramp up virtually guarantees that parts of the circuitry will be biased incorrectly and operating in the linear region during a slow power up. Probably oscillating randomly. A few seconds probably wouldn't result in damage - ala CMOS circuits dissipating lots of power in an effort to switch too fast, but it serves no purpose at all.

And you're saying that the specification for ATX PS's is wrong?

Can't buy that - goes against logic - goes against Intel - goes against the stone tablets.

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Not necessarily when the PC is idle and only a little swapping takes place.

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