[WEB4LIB] Re: Powering down PCs

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

Sorry, Rich, but I _agree_ with your statement, pretty much in its
entirety. By far the most important thing for power consumption is to be
sure monitors (a) are Energy Star compliant and (b) are *set up* for Energy
Star compliance--that is, not going to a totally unnecessary screen saver
but going to standby mode after some reasonable interval. The monitor is
the single biggest power draw (unless you're using LCD screens, e.g., at
circ stations), and Energy Saver mode typically eliminates 90% of the draw
for the monitor.

I was primarily arguing against the (in my belief) outmoded notion that
it's worth it to leave totally-unused PCs on overnight because they'll last
longer. If there are other good reasons to leave the systems running in
standby mode--for remote testing, upgrades, because schedules are
irregular, whatever--of course those reasons should take
precedence.Examples given here have all been good explicit reasons to keep
PCs powered (but not to keep screens in full-power mode).

[Re other peripherals: Note that most *recent* printers, whether inkjet or
laser, use almost no energy except when actually printing: e.g., my HP
LaserJet 5P at home uses <5 watts while idling, and most inkjets probably
use less than that. If a printer uses less power than a nightlight, it's
not clear that there's any good reason to power it down--except, of course,
that some inkjets groom themselves when they're put through power cycles.
Older laser printers chew up considerable energy idling; they also make
noise and give off ozone (which the 5P and similar printers don't), so
there are other good reasons to turn them off.]

>So... I think the thing to do is to include Energy Star compliance in your
>fleet purchase evaluations, and pay particular attention to the monitor's
>power consumption when it is in full sleep mode (NEC for instance has
>monitors that sleep at 8 watts) and make sure power management is enabled
on
>all PCs -- and not thwarted by screen savers.

Just to make things more confusing, I'll add a couple of other notions:

1. Older PCs did have real issues with power cycles, before power supplies
were redesigned to make startups "soft." But "older" in this case means a
*lot* older, as in PC/AT vintage or before.

2. I think someone alluded to another "reason" to take PCs through power
cycles periodically, particularly if you're running Netscape Navigator or
certain other programs under Windows 98 or Windows 95. Some software still
manages to chew up system resources through bad management, particularly
when using multimedia, and will eventually bring Windows to its knees.
Windows 98 resists this better than Windows 95; Windows NT (and presumably
2000) seems to be pretty much foolproof in this regard. (For people with
long memories, older CD-ROMs built using Macromedia Director were classic
in this regard under Windows 3.x and, to a lesser extent, Windows 95: they
would pretty much consistently crash Windows after half an hour to an hour
of intensive multimedia activity, because Director never released system
resources.) Of course, restarting the system would have the same effect.

-wcc-