Re: Re Xy on XP--an amende honorable

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Michael Norman 
on Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:57:29 -0400


> I thought one way to help protect the health of your hard
> drive was to shut down at night.

The opposite! The most stressful task a computer performs,
apart from backing up, is booting up. Plus that power-on surge
of electricity takes a toll. Ask yourself: when have your
computers failed most frequently? When you rebooted, right? So
don't! And I don't hibernate either -- a total PITA (logging
back on, waste of time). Just power down your drives and your
monitor after X minutes of no-access, via Control Panel ==>
Power Options (or whatever XP calls this applet). Make sure you
don't have a browser screen up that is constantly refreshing
itself -- or an Email client that does the same thing, etc.

And I always Run as Administrator -- plenipotentiary. And I
disable all Security. And I disable most of the default boot-up
background apps -- all the schedulers and messengers and
"quick-startups" and auto-updaters and similar junk. If it
takes a nanosecond longer for Acrobat or Photoshop to launch --
who cares. This is the stuff that drags computers down to a
snail's pace -- XP is just chockful of it.

It's hard for me to believe that a laptop running 24x365 in this
manner is burning much juice, so I think the energy issue is a
sham. One light bulb burns a lot more.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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