Topic awaiting preservation: Do you turn you HD off?

Do you use Control Panel / Power Options / Power Schemes to turn off you hard disks after some period of time?

If so, which period of time you use?
If not, do you have a good reason?

I'm more than curious in your way of dealing with this feature (if you guys and girls are aware of it).

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

No. Because i didnt knew about it until now. And i cant see the option around? is it an XP (maybe NT) only feature?

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Sexy Demoness cel

Yes. After the computer has been idle for an hour powers down to a standby mode.

Why? I never switch my PC off (unless there's a storm) and because saving power is always a good thing, for costs and for the environment as the power consumption of the average australian is needlessly high -- given no country gets 100% of it's power from clean sources, this help to prevent pollution. Think global - Act local.

Alevice: In the screen where you setup your screen saver, there should be a "power" option, from which you can control the times at which your computer will power down the monitor and hard disks or evter standby mode etc ect...

Aaaaaaaah, got what you mean. At first i thought of something like disabling an individual HDD.

I used to do that, but my comp is a bit unstable and often when i reactivated it it just didnt return me to windows. And myself being an energy-saver whore (cursed high taxes around here, and the fact that my dad doesnt like i keep it turned on often) that sucks.

Btw, i never had an idea on how much energy is aprox. used when "sleeping". Anyone knows?

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Sexy Demoness cel

THat would greatly depend on what devices you have in your computer. If you have a case decked out with a 450W power supply, lots of Fans and silly lighting mods, several HDD's, a beefy gfx card with multiple large CRT monitors and a surround sound system that required it's own power source, then it'd consume a lot more power in any state than a standard office PC.

quote:

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I used to do that, but my comp is a bit unstable and often when i reactivated it it just didnt return me to windows.

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BINGO!!!

That's exactly the reason that, after using this feature for a good amount of time, I decided to turn it off for a while to see if my computer gets more stable. Lately - actually, more earlier than lately - I started believing that when my computer has to wake up some of the HDs, this is starting to make the system unstable. Then, now, I turned that feature off to see what happens.
And it really sucks, not because of the energy that I'm spending more, I don't care about it, but because of the noise. When the HDs are on, it's good. But when they are off, specially the older one, it's better. It gets really silent. I now have five of them in my computer, two of them outside the case because I don't have more space inside (they are all internal HDs).

About how much energy they spend, we can guess. My maxtor 200 GB, according to the specs, for 5v, needs from 90 to 858 mA of current (idle 668 mA). This means that, when it's in stand-by, it's using around 0.5 watts, and that's absolutely nothing. When it's idle, it's wasting around 3 W, and that's nothing. When it's seeking, it's wasting around 5 watts, and that's still nothing. If you leave it on for 24 hours a day, for 30 days, it will waste around 2.5 to 3.5 kilowatt-hour, supposing it will never go in standby. In my country, 3 kilowatt-hour costs around one dollar. And of course you are not going to leave it on all month long.

My arse that's not much. Multiply that by all the people that use computers who are ignorant about power consumption and you?re looking at millions, more likely billions (in a global sense) of dollars a year in wasted energy. And that's just your computer, let alone the other electrical gadgets and lights that you leave switched on when you don't need them.

The amount of power we waste globally is quite insane. In a perfect world, where everyone was careful about the amount of power we wasted, we could probably shut down a good 10% of the power plants in most countries which would conserve resources and limit waste pollution.

But of course, it's not hip to care about such things. Don't let me stop you, go ahead and fuck up the planet and waste our natural resources because you don't want to be seen as uncool. Just don't complain when the electricity company raises their tariffs because the government made them spend an extra billion a year on waste control.

I have a much simpler way of dealing with my computer when I'm not going ot be using it for a while: I turn the whole damn thing off. That way you're not wasting any power whatsoever.

I usually leave my PC on overnight downloading stuff so I can't idle my hard disks and if I was going to leave the PC in a state where the hard disks weren't going to be used I'd switch the whole machine off. Leaving on your monitor is a bigger waste of power, don't use a screensaver and leave it on, turn off your monitor.

My monitor is always set up to turn itself off after 30 minutes of inactivity.

About wasting energy, it's interesting how people are so different.
I was travelling by car in Switzerland some years ago, my wife and I (we had no daughters back then), then we stopped at some parking lot just to take a look at the road map because we were sort of lost. One minute or less after we stopped, a woman came by and politely asked us to stop the engine, because since we were stopped, keeping the engine on was damaging the environment, she told us (she sort of tried to teach us very quickly about ozone layer, pollution, etc).

We politely stopped the engine because we didn't want her to think of us as monsters of the environment.

Here in the USA, they have cars that you can lock the doors without nobody inside, keeping the engine on, just for the sake of keeping the car cold (when in the Summer) or warm (if in the Winter), while the driver goes away to do some stuff.

Isn't it funny? I guess that if the Swiss woman saw how Americans - some Americans - deal with this environment awareness stuff, she'd go crazy.

I was raised in a home where my father was always mad at anyone that were wasting energy without a good reason. But my father's reasoning was based on wasting his money, and not on damaging the environment.

By the way, I think USA and _AUSTRALIA_ didn't ratify the Kyoto protocol, did they?
Brazil did.

EDIT: I'd love to own one of those American cars...

[This message has been edited by viol (edited 12-20-2003).]

Exactly, since our governments, against the wishes of their own people, saw fit not a ratify the charter that could very well be the difference between whether or not this planet stays a viable home, residents of the USA and Australia have to work even harder in order to help protect the environment.