I generally follow the same startegy as Gary. Boot it up in the morning sleep thru out my working day when im away from my desk. Then shut down when i hit the door. I think the power consumption aurgument is a moot point.
I don't see why its necessary for desktops. I just leave mine on 24/7 ... I do turn it off maybe ever 2 or 3 weeks for a night just to let everything cool down completely.
My hard drive and monitor both go to memory saving states, as do other parts of the computer. I figure that part of the convenience of having a desktop is that I never am waiting for it to boot, EVER. Not even 1 second.
The sleep option is the one I use. To me it just makes sense so it is not a concept that I disagree with.
I don't disagree with the concept of using sleep either. Just a habit for me to turn it off at night. I found that Vista needed a shutdown or reboot occasionally to clean out the RAM so stayed with the habit. I did go a week in Vista of not shutting down and while it was better than W2K I continued my habit. I have noticed that Seven is handling RAM far better than Vista. I have not yet tried running it for a week, but will once the public beta is out. I doubt that the difference in power consumption between shutdown and sleep overnight is worth worrying about. Seems a 6 to 1 half dozen to the other deal to me, as I can get up in the morning and hit the power button on the way to the coffee maker and before I get back the comp is all booted and waiting.
Gary
Oh I am not saying there is anything WRONG with it, just that its not necessary.
I am going to do a restart at least of my machine weekly though , perhaps even like a "saturday night shut down" every week, let it sit cold. :)
I already use sleep on 7 & its the same as putting XP in standby, I have it set to wake by mouse, works for me.
ok so I know this may be strange but after reading some of the posts I was slightly confused where the info came from.
I guess you guys know that a shut down laptop still loses energy, and that 1w is really not that much when compared to the amount in the battery. Also since lithium battery just keeping it connected wastes about as much energy as the os would at 1w. ( that's one j/sec) (How long would that take to drain a battery?)
Ok so more to my area of expertise - the light bulbs. Your right, some environmental light bulbs suck, basically anything not fluorescent. Fluorescent light bulbs - contrary to what the guy before said do not take more power to start up than ordinary bulbs, they do have a lower brightness for the first while but they still take 13W to produce the 60W of light of a normal bulb, they also last longer - the normal light bulbs average 750 hours, fluorescent do 10,000.
As for the problems with the heavy metals- not really an issue, I wouldnt recommend you eat it, but the soil in most cities has more contaminants.
Also over the life of the bulb, the bulb produces much much less contaminants than the amount released by producing the energy to power the other bulbs. (Thats assuming that it was produced by everything except renewable energy sources)
None of those are the real problems, we're talking the third generation of environmental light bulbs - if they hadn't sorted that out by now then they'd be shot.
There are real problems though - white light. Its not normal and your body cant handle it, it stops you sleeping, gives you headaches ( some people) and generally is not good thing to read by. But computers use LCDs that do the same things and are twice as bad for you.
I dont know, I just have trouble hearing some of these things since most of the science used to make them is really badly done. Dont believe it. If you have any questions just ask and I will clarify. I am also not saying this to grand stand- I am an Environmental science student who's spent way too much of his life on this issue.
I don't like to keep the programs in RAM during sleep for extended periods of time...too worried about errors/corrupted files, etc.
