Re: Re Xy on XP--an amende honorable

[jaymcnally@xxxxxxxx]

 
Back in the late 1980s my IT people told me that booting up was by far the biggest stress on our computers (mother boards and circuites), so I instructed our newsroom of reporters to keep their machines going 5 days a week, and we shut down on weekends. I thought I was rather enlightened.   Many months later we had to buy new fans for the computers because the bearings wore out. My IT people were upset that they had to give up half a day to travel to our office to fix the things several times and my publisher thought I was nuts.   After that we quit keeping the computers running all the time at that paper.
 
At another newspaper (in 1993 or so) I kept a PC (386 or an AT, I think) hooked to our wire services operating 24/7 month after month and eventually had to buy a whole new computer because dust got into the innards from the fan and the thing overheated.  The IT guy who came out to fix it thought I was nuts for letting it get so dirty.
 
I wish I were more expert on these matters, but twice-burned, twice shy is my mode.
 
-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Robert Holmgren"  

> ** 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 t
his 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. 
> 
> ----------------------------- 
> Robert Holmgren 
> holmgren@xxxxxxxx 
> ----------------------------- !
 
>
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