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

[HerrKaLeun]

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.

 

[Zirro]

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.

 

[noobvious]

I use sleep mode, but at night I do close out all programs first.

 

[pestul]

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

 

[mlevy]

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.

 

[Wordsworth]

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.

 

[macgyver2]

my father lost 6 computers some servers running in his home for a computer group and lightning struck and killed it all. Now I unplug even my laptop in bad weather.

I have used sleep mode a ton with my laptop but I have also burned out my battery pretty fast and will need a new one before this one is even a year old. When I had desktops I would use sleep mode plugged into a UPS during storms, otherwise the screen was turned off but the box would stay on and only be turned off for updates or weekly system cleaning.

Back in my A+ training days we did power use tests with our home computers over a 2 month time. Leaving my old 386 on all the time used 20 bucks less power then all the turning off and on we did the month before. It was a neat test but with today's PC's I don't think it really matters.

 

[HJA]

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?

 

[severedsolo]

in my own personal (and probably very wrong opinion it breaks down to this:

Sleep mode resumes quicker, of course it does, the PC doesnt have to reload Windows, because its already there, (after all isnt "windows" mainly held in the ram? it just reads the bits it needs from the HDD on startup right?) but then again, if you go on the microsoft website and look at their tips to improve your PC performance, the FIRST thing they recomend is "switch your PC off to unclog the RAM" so for the extra 30 seconds it takes to boot up, you may as well shut down at night to unclog it right?

we've come a long way from the days of XP having a "shelf life" before it had to reboot or be unusable, (try it for yourself in XP type "systeminfo" in command prompt, it will tell you the recomended time between restarts in all that info) but at the end of the day, id rather take the extra time, to go and grab myself a coffee and then when i come back it will sit there being idle for me, they say time is money, but can you really not afford to lose 30 seconds?

personally i found that when running on sleep only, the performance gradually degraded over the course of a week until i did a shut down and reboot, at which point it went back to normal

id be interested to hear from people who always sleep and never S/D just to see how it compares to my experiences,

 

[Etihtsarom]

I don't really S/D with my rigs. But this performance degradation you're talking about doesn't seem to happen. Windows won't release the RAM used by some applications, but then that happens on systems with normal usage, sleep or no sleep.

Sleep is just the best time saving tool. Long live sleep. (Except some times resuming from sleep doesn't wake my monitor up, but that's a separate issue b/c my monitor is a TV and connected by HDMI).

 

[jay817]

For me depends on how long I will be away I use a laptop as my main machine and use it at college. if I am going to be a while (over a hour) I will shut down if at home but at college I usually use sleep during break and dinner in the class room (locked until class resumes) expect I sometime leave it running to perform a full virus scan during a dinner break.

 

[severedsolo]

Windows won't release the RAM used by some applications, but then that happens on systems with normal usage, sleep or no sleep.

thats what i meant, I didnt make it very clear i know, i meant i think S/D is beneficial to release this "lost" RAM as i found Windows was never releasing it, an example: at bootup after all "basic" systems have been started (ie Zone Alarm, Windows and Utorrent which is set to run at startup) My PC uses 28% of its 3GB of RAM, now Firefox especially, iv noticed has a tendency not to release its RAM when its shut down, by the end of the week i was using 50-60% at the same basic level because of certain apps, (again mainly firefox from what i could see) not telling Windows that the RAM wasnt in use any more,

in the interests of fairness i should point out that sleep was not used every night, often i leave the PC on overnight, sleep was perhaps used 3-4 nights out of 7. im not saying that sleep was causing this problem, Im merely saying that a shutdown can be helpful to free up the "lost" RAM (more useful me thinks would be Mozilla coing up with a FF that memory manages better.. although tbh it seems to be alot better (that iv noticed) since upgrading to 3.5.6)