Whats the most energy-efficient power management option for my computer?
If your computer supports suspend – use that. You get the convenience of instant on and you save almost all the power that you would by turning it off. I’ve been doing the turn off/suspend thing for 15 years and I haven’t had any better or worse luck with hardware failure than the people that just leave their computers on. I have saved money on electricity, though. I think the “using more power starting up” misnomer carries over from the perhaps-true aphorism of turning a car off and starting it up uses more gas than just letting it idle for X number of minutes.
five fresh fish this used to be the case back maybe 10 years ago or so when quality control for PC parts is not what it is today Ryvar… Quality control isn’t an issue of time or manufacturer! 😀 In fact, I think we’re back in for a big line of broken computers in the next little while. Consumers have whittled the bottom line out of computer parts so badly, we return up to about 10% of even Asus boards at my shop now. It’s expected when said Asus board costs only about $80, and the “equivalent” bottom of the barrel PC Chips board is about $60. The latest motherboards are using thinner and thinner and cheaper and cheaper PCB substrate, which reminds me of the bad old 486 days. It’s to be expected when everyone thinks a PC should cost under $300. As far as this thread is concerned, it doesn’t really matter if you turn the thing off at night, honestly. If you have junk components they’ll just fail, no doubt about it. As far as more po
I like the convenience of having my computer on; also, I can start things (downloads, defragmentation back in the old days, etc) and let them run overnight or when I’m out or whatever. On top of that, occasionally my computer will be the gateway for another computer (i.e. providing internet access to another), so it’s just polite to keep it on. All modern OSes have options to let your hard drives and monitor power down, and a mostly-idle computer with the monitor and drives off uses very little power. I’ve kept my computer(s) on 24/7 since about, uh, the mid-to-late 90s, and I’ve never had anything bad happen because of it.
Related Questions
- I understand that Microsoft ships Vista with computer power management settings enabled. So there is no need to activate sleep settings on Vista machines, right?
- I manually shut down my computer and monitor at night. What will happen when the power management scheme is applied?
- When my computer is inactive, how soon does BigFix power management start up?
