Leave it on or shut it down?
I turn my desktop computer (running XP) off every day when I'm not using it. It is a pain to wait for startup and shutdown times, but I'm concerned for the environment and all that.
I think most people leave it running 24 hours. I can understand why. Sometimes it take over 10 minutes to really get all services loaded. I've tried hibernate, but the Dell 9150 I use comes back from Hibernate with the fan running at full speed and it's very noisy. Windows seems to be geared for 24 operation-- with automated processes kicking off at different times of the day. It's like the fridge-- but I'm not sure how it compares in terms of energy consumption.
I've actually set my bios to kick on at 4am so the computer has finished start-up before I get up there ten minutes later. It does all my site backups at a specific time.
I'm trying to find more energy efficient uses of the pc. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to know.
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About Eric Wroolie
Eric Wroolie is a software developer specialising in project Outsourcing and Offshoring.
As a software developer since 1998, he has built applications for Barclays Capital, BBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Omega Logic.
In 2004, he founded Overpass, a company that provides offshoring services to UK and US organisations.
He is a San Diego native who has spent the last 10 years living in England and working in London.
Eric speaks Chinese Mandarin and served in the US Army as a Mandarin and Vietnamese linguist.
In addition to being able to speak Mandarin, Eric can juggle three balls for almost twenty seconds, and make fart noises using his hands only (this is more difficult than it sounds-- try it).
Eric has an MCSD in Visual Basic 6 and previous languages, but now works with .Net. He holds ScrumMaster Certification with Scrum Alliance.
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January 1st, 1970 - 00:00
July 4th, 2009 - 08:18
Well I guess it won’t satisfy your needs but just for your information, my ubuntu OS boots in less than a minute and shuts down in 5 seconds… and my laptop is 4 years old.
July 4th, 2009 - 08:24
@RunningTracker Thanks RunningTracker. I use Ubuntu on my laptop (using it now) and really like it. Sometimes I need to do ASP.Net work or other MS work for clients, so I keep the desktop on Windows. That’s the only reason I haven’t completely switched over.
I prefer working with Ruby on Rails lately and have been really tempted to dump XP altogether. The only thing keeping me on is iTunes and Visual Studio. I know both have alternatives in Linux, but I’m not too impressed with them.
But Ubuntu (or any Linux) looks more and more attractive all the time.
July 4th, 2009 - 17:57
Thanks for your answer Eric. Yeah that’s what I thought. I read in one of your previous posts that you were doing some dot net development… I can understand that you need Windows for this! Anyway, let’s hope Windows 7 will boot and shut down as fast as the new Linux distribs!
July 6th, 2009 - 19:55
Have you tried scheduling a defrag and tidying up the cache once a month? My XP on my very old desktop was slow. I gave it a bigger hard drive space and have a defragmentation scheduled every week using the XP scheduler and this 8 year old machine is very good for simple stuffs like voice chats, browsing and the like. Just an idea.