In Windows 7 Use Sleep to Resume the OS in 2 Seconds

garysgold said:

With no statement about where the break even point is, the info is fairly useless. Is 1 hour in sleep better than shutdown? How about 3 or 4 hours? Is power consumption the only consideration as the article would suggest or are things being worn out as davehc suggests? Tell me the whole story, then I will reconsider how I do things.

This reminds me of the greenies who want us all to use the squiggly light bulbs. When I am done with a light I turn it off. This on off cycle may happen 20 times in a day. The squiggles are florescent bulbs and florescent bulbs use more energy to start up than they will use in the next 2-3 hours, so am I saving with those bulbs or actually losing?

Not enough info to make a proper decision.

Gary

that's not true. there is a little rush-in-current whne you start a fluorescent ballast. that maybe is 3-5 times of regular current. Assuming it takes 1 second to turn the bulb on, it would take 5 seconds of regular lighting time.

When I was in 3rd grade (many years ago) teachers would tell us the same tale about the 2-3 hours of energy it takes. Fact is, if you did the math how much current that had to be, you'd kill the power plant by turning on a bulb (sure you'd kill your fuses).

abut the mercury: it is less than the coal power plant would expose us to when using more energy. I agree, compact fluorescent (CFL) are not the greatest compared to high-lumen T8 or T5 4'lamps. both are twice as efficient than CFL, with programmed start ballast can be turned on and off frequently (in combination with occupancy sensor), have only a third or quarter of mercury per lumen hour. For little lamps I'd just go with the LEDs
(I do commercial lighting design, for residential use CFL probably right now are the best choice due to the low number of hours used, although LED seem to be making progress). CFL have the inheritant flaw of overheating the ballast, the less efficient shape etc. I'd never use them on commercial jobs. however, they beat incandescent and halogen. Jsut stick with GE or soem other brand. If you buy some Chinese import crap with some unknown name, of course they won't last. Same with the tons of cheap LED lamps. there are a few really good ones, many are jsut crap. but tha tis not inherent to the LED itself, inherent to cheap crap.

About the PC shutdown: I unplug my PC (and router and modem) with a power strip. Zero consumption while off. I also think rebooting every once awhile cleans everything. It only takes soem seconds to boot. The most time my PC hangs around in BIOS and RAID controller startup etc. Windows itself is really fast. So now if they got rid of the pre-windows stuff, that'd be great.

At work we are subject to disciplinary action of we do not shutdown at then end of each day.
Updates to our very tightly locked down standard image are occcasionally trickled through during the day and some require a reboot to implement. I've never had a problem with this.

I live in tropical climate where severe thunderstorms are a regular occurrence.
Therefore at home, I always shutdown when I've finished mucking around on the PC and disconnect from power sockets & the phone line to avoid a million volts frying my PC.
This happened to one of my bosses home machines recently - borked all his gear.

Well, I'm never trying sleep again. I just tried it out of curiosity after reading this thread.. it didn't even come out of sleep. The fans/etc turned on, but I'm pretty sure the HDDs didn't. So I hard powered it and it looked like the system was DOA (not even a BIOS screen - guessing it was still trying to resume from sleep). So I flicked the switch on my PSU then booted it. It got past the BIOS screen then resumed.. :S

I use sleep on my laptop when I'm around, just close the lid and let it sleep, open the lid and it resumes. I think it eventually will go to hibernate, but when I go to bed at night I put it in hibernate myself. My desktop runs all the time, though now that the laptop is my primary machine that may change, I just haven't brought myself to do it yet.

I use both sleep and shutdown depending upon how long I expect to be away from the computer. If I shutdown I also turn off the power strip; if I'm going away for several days I unplug the power strip. In my neck of the woods we have too many power outages; one within the last two weeks. I've too much money and labor into this box to leave it to the winds of nature, or the whims of the power company.

I'll catch hell for this from the enviromentalists but I've had a PC running almost all the time since 1999. I have SETI running even now. Shut the monitor off and let it fly. Now have 78,500 hours and 201.60 quadrillion floating-point operations.
With my new PC It runs 4 sets at once. Sleep? Whats that?