Save All Around by Powering Your Computer Down

"Your memory is still fully functioning, which can lead to overheating and damage"

I have a degree in Computer Engineering and worked in IT for over 15 years. That's garbage. Sleeping a computer won't overheat anything. Who writes this stuff? If anything, I've seen more power supplies die (one of the first components to go south in a computer) during reboots than simply idling or sleeping the computer. As somebody who has supervised many servers, I always cringe when a critical server gets shut-down and booted back up. Power supplies use big capacitors that fail with age and it manifests that self during shutdown/reboots.

If it takes 5 seconds to start from sleep, and 1 minute 5 seconds to boot up completely, then that's a whole minute of 100% wasted power. My desktop actually takes less than 5 secs to start from sleep, and a couple minutes to totally boot up from power down.

hi jay

thanks for the info. i have moved to palm beach county to be nearer my children since my last stint in the hospital and rehab. i do enjoy your e-mails

alfred

This article is by far one of the most ignorant pieces I've read in a long time. IF you have a modern laptop of PC running any of the newer intel or amd CPU's you should not have any problem with longevity. They are extremely power efficient, sipping energy while sleeping, and generating far less heat (10C-15C) than Duo Core and Pentium processors. Overheating memory?!? The clock speed for RAM in a standard PC/Laptop is very low (1333mhz in DDR3). This low speed produces almost no heat, even in a laptop. So your RAM is safe. If you're worried about heat destroying your PC/Laptop, consider this; You dust your furniture once a week or month, some of that dust makes it into you computer via a case fan. In 2.5 years, you could have a serious amount of build up. So instead of shutting your PC down every day, shut it off every 6 months or so, buy some compressed air, and dust it out. Laptop owners can go a bit further by dismantling the cooling unit on the CPU and dusting it, as well as replacing the thermal paste with a higher quality Arctic Silver. People, computers are not complicated to physically maintain. Get on google and find tear-down instructions for your specific model, follow them step by step and you can SAVE money by doing the work yourself.

People turn off their computers? Mine has been on for the past 3 years with minimal breaks for updates.

I leave too may windows open. It's not the boot time, it's having to mark and refind my place in various things I'm reading that I leave it on for.

Insane Roy: I have NEVER seen a laptop setup correct! NEVER!!!! The dumbest one is the hard drive timeout NOT being set. Set the drive to 30 minutes of no use. The drive cycles down and has a much longer life. To speed it up, set the virtual memory manually to a level such as 4096 for newer laptops with 2 Gbytes ram, that effectively gives you about 6 Gbytes ram.

Bulldoze 97, A server is DESIGNED with a separate power supply, special cooling fans for the processor and super ventilation. A laptop has a nuclear reactor (the CPU) crammed into a tiny space. When power is on, it slowly cooks the area around the CPU and the chip itself until it croaks. Not not only that, the thermal material betweeen the CPU and the cooler slowly dries out in some manufacturers and the CPU smokes.. . The concept of turning off the power strip has multiple reasons, the external supply continues to eat watts and the laptop is not isolated from over voltage surges. Most power strips are defective. They are designed to protect the stuff from high voltage surges BUT in many ,the diodes that do the protection are a one time affair and in the second hit, you are fried. Buy a GOOOD NAME brand power strip abd not an el cheapo. There is a diode that survives and protects many times, I know I patented it.

As a computer geek, I have been teaching this forever BUT the customers want that INSTANT on and then wonder why it is dead in 2.5 years!

Energy used by the computer translates into heat - in the heating seasons, it just means that the home heating system has to generate slightly less. Net result - no savings at all. The jury is still out on the most failure prone component in the system (the hard drive) and which is better: let it run or power up/down frequently.