[WEB4LIB] Re: Catalog Use Only (Public Stations)

[David Merchant]

>Don't power them down.  No reason to do so.  Doing so will shorten
>their life anyway.

Doing the Devil's Advocate, at least in our situation at my library, 
leaving the computers on mean 24 hours of drawing in our incredibly dusty 
atmosphere inside the computer, especially our Reference Center computers 
which sit right in the path of several air ducts, I have blown out huge 
dust jack-rabbits over and over again from them.  Such heavy coating of 
dust can be argued as unhealthy for the computer's life as well.  And, we 
have many old computers who at times tend to have their fans die on them 
during the night, and I get a call of a dead computer that is smelling like 
there may be smoke coming out of it, upon opening the case I find extreme 
heat, memory chips that are burning hot to the touch (as they resided right 
under the power supply whose fan had died), and fying dust bunnies. I thus 
recommend at my library that the older computers, at least, are turned off, 
and I will be advocating that the reference center ones be turned off as 
well (also, at least rebooting them will clear out the memory registers, 
allow us to clear out any print jobs that have hung in the background, etc).

But it is agreed that turning off and on does have the disadvantage of chip 
creep and power surges, the latter bad for life span.

TTFN,
David
Head, Systems Dept, Louisiana Tech University
merchant at latech.edu
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