Every night I switch off my now "old" (5years ) computer and every morning I switch it back on again and like me it's taking longer to wake up in the morning. Is it really necessary ?am I really helping save the planet ?would it over heat ?
p.s It was Matthew Wright on channel 5 who was told he needed a new computer 'cos his was "old" at 5 years :o
Macmac,
I do the same, but for personal reasons. I have a graphics card which is a bit noisey so we turn off the PC and ensure the power unit is also off at the back of the stack.
This will save you money in the long run as the power unit is the thing that draws so much juice from you lecky.
Do not worry about the age of the unit as I have a newish one, a oldish laptop and a stoneage laptop which all work fine if you maintain them.
I do not know about the planet thing as most of the world does not adhere to the ways of helping old mother nature.
They always tell people that whenyou get a new PC that it is out of date and to update it. How else are they to make money out of us?
My aged Windows PC took about 20 minutes to turn on in the morning, and often refused to turn off at night until deprived of electricity!
I've now got an !Mac. Leave it be and it turns itself off; press any key and it comes on instantly.
Well, why shouldn't a computer be able to that? My coffee grinder can, and the radio, and the washing machine!
Set it to hibernate after however long you want it to, then just a quick twitch in the morning to wake it up again.
de-frag it, and run some software like 'regcure'. also tidy up your desktop, this should sort it out. and yes, switch off overnight, you can always make a cuppa whilst it warms up!! (after all, you ain't that impatient are you?) ;)
Quote from: tonybloke on October 02, 2009, 09:28:38
de-frag it, and run some software like 'regcure'. also tidy up your desktop, this should sort it out. and yes, switch off overnight, you can always make a cuppa whilst it warms up!! (after all, you ain't that impatient are you?) ;)
When my desktop and laptop got to be slow starting up and working, due to AV scanning everything in sight, I changed to a Linux system. No need for AV (although it is available if you want to prevent virus infecting Windows computers on the same network, and its free). The operating system and software is free as well, all you pay for is the hardware. Any equipment left on 24/7 is using power, switch it off. If you want to check your power comsumption, get a power monitor 13amp adapter, you will be surprised at the readings (some will be higher than you expect and others lower, it's no use reading the label on the equipment). One thing I have says "1.0amp" on the label but the reading is 20watts (0.083333333amp) whilst a mains radio shows no wattage.
I only have my PCs on when I need to use them. The laptop is nearly new and takes no time at all to boot up. The Desktop is much older but less than 5 years old and takes an age to boot up. I have to turn it on in advance of wanting to use it otherwise I sit there for ages waiting for it. It has never been that quick to boot up but has got worse of late as the hard drive has filled up. I keep meaning to have a good clean up/out but never seem to get the time to do it. I am thinking of getting a portable/external HDD for storage and help make it run faster but again havent got around to actualy buying one yet!
To go back to the original question, I think it is a good idea to turn a PC right off when not in use since even in standby or hibernation mode it still must use some electricity
Hope this helps.
We turn off PCs, tellies, DVD players, Wii, washing machine etc when not in use but recently my PC developed a "feature" apparently well know to this model. It's got a dodgy connection in the on/off button and, assuming you get past that problem and it decides to cooperate, it won't do anything before all its USB ports have been disconnected.
Pain in bum so it gets left on 24/7 now.
Quote from: Garden Assistant on November 10, 2009, 16:57:51
To go back to the original question, I think it is a good idea to turn a PC right off when not in use since even in standby or hibernation mode it still must use some electricity
Standyby uses power to retain data in memory but hibernation mode uses no power at all as the State of your PC is written to disk. It does require a tiny bit of power to write to and read from the disk but not actually in hibernation itself. You can take your hard drive out of the PC and put it back in and it will still wake up!!!
Quote from: BarriedaleNick on November 10, 2009, 19:12:02
Quote from: Garden Assistant on November 10, 2009, 16:57:51
To go back to the original question, I think it is a good idea to turn a PC right off when not in use since even in standby or hibernation mode it still must use some electricity
Standyby uses power to retain data in memory but hibernation mode uses no power at all as the State of your PC is written to disk. It does require a tiny bit of power to write to and read from the disk but not actually in hibernation itself. You can take your hard drive out of the PC and put it back in and it will still wake up!!!
That's very interesting. Didnt realise that. Thanks for the info.