Leaving PCs On Overnight Costs $2.8B Annually

I leave my gaming system on because I don't want to wait 3-5 minutes for the damn thing to start every day. It takes a long time to start up due to loading 2 DBMS and all my dev tools. I can't go into sleep mode or hibernate with it because for some reasons my EVGA board has never played well with either one.

My HTPC works fine with sleep mode and I have it set to sleep in 10 minutes.
 
That article is hiding the real truth!!!

1 dead baby seal = 1 more hungry shark = 1 more person eaten by hungry shark. Leaving your computer on is commiting murder!!!

Seriously, I cut my computer off only at night because of the power bill. I'm not using it so why waste the little bit of money that the government lets me keep.
 
Freezebyte said:
I'm busy Bittorrenting and xbox 360ing so planet earth can suck it
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if you really are such a bit torrent fiend, arent there standalone NAS drives that have torrent programs built in?

i recently converted my home server to an old headless pentium m dothan laptop pegged at 600mhz and undervolted... so i dont feel too guilty about keeping my server/torrent machine on 24/7 :)
 
My workstation gets put to sleep every time I leave my desk for more than a few minutes, and also goes to sleep over night. If I am going to be gone for more than a day, I shut it off completely. Most of that though is the fact that my desk is in my bedroom, and the fans are a bit too loud for me to sleep.

Now I also have a server that is on 24/7, and will never be shut off except for upgrades/repairs and the occasional power outage (looking to get a UPS to take care of that). It's an old P3 with 512 MB of ram, a pair of 1TB WD "green" hard drives for data, and an 8GB CF card for the OS (Ubuntu 8.10). It also has a BFG LS-450 power supply which is 80 plus certified. I don't know how much power it's using, but I can only imagine it's a fraction of the amount my workstation uses. It's main purpose is file backups. My workstation gets backed up every day before I go to bed, and I also have a couple web servers for work that rsync their data to my server for offsite backup every night. Plus my friend has a similar server at his house, and we rsync our data to each other every night for offsite backups. Most of this runs in the middle of the night when I'm asleep, so the server must stay on.
 
At home my pc is shut off if I'm not using Utorrent. At college, I could really give a shit, I pay way too much for crappy food and crappy housing to care.
 
if we shut down our 500+ desktops every night many wouldnt wake up. Wake on LAN is only so reliable when you have an unrestricted BIOS and kids constantly mucking around in there...

next image will have BIOS passwords but it still wouldnt make sense to turn off @ night. we've got WSUS, AV, and software updates that need rolling out and thats largely unacceptable during the day. AV definitions are fine during the day but AV program updates and Windows Updates may require reboots and that's no bien.
 
Vesuvius said:
If you left your pickup running 24/7 for the past 10 years, it you wouldn't have had to waste all that time smoking and warming it up in the morning.

And by the logic of a few people in this forum. Your pick up would probably never have a service issue in that time because turning it off and starting it up causes all the damage......
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This is just wonderful news for people with anxiety :eek:


I used to be running the computers in my sig but now I've been using a cheap acer travelmate 2310 just for web surfing / pron / well you get the idea. I still keep it on all day when I'm working with it, and for night I usually play poker online.. so for the 4 hours I'm sleeping, I much rather it to stay on. Makes a nice heater for my head at night :D
 
Vesuvius said:
People thinking it's "cool" to leave on your PC when not in use must also be the ones who loved $4/gallon gasoline. I cannot think of a single good reason to keep your typical desktop/notebook workstation running while not in use.

FOLDING is great, congratulations, but the fact is the same work could be done by efficiently built server farms at a fraction of the cost to the environment per FLOP. Distributed computing benefits those running the project because its free CPU power, they care more about free cycles than they care about environmentally friendly cycles.

Do yourself a favor, save the 5-10 bucks a month and shutdown. Do the rest of us a favor so we won't eventually have to live with brownouts when power companies are near their yearly max for emissions, because a few million tools think an idling PC is a necessity.
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How about no. I don't want to have to be compelled to do anything my system because you are FUD'ing up the works.
 
Vesuvius said:
If you left your pickup running 24/7 for the past 10 years, it you wouldn't have had to waste all that time smoking and warming it up in the morning.

And by the logic of a few people in this forum. Your pick up would probably never have a service issue in that time because turning it off and starting it up causes all the damage......
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Well that's just stupid. :D

Actually, that's not a great analogy only because gasoline is more expensive than a Kw of electricity.
 
I have my 37" Westinghouse attached to my desktop and watch HD movies while I fall asleep... so yea... -_-
 
I turn off my home computer at night because it is in the bedroom and the flashing lights from sleep mode would bother me.

At work I feel guilty for wasting the power by leaving it on (I turn off the monitor though), but I do anyway because when I do shut it off half the time it will lose my profile and it is a pain in the ass to restore my settings. It's also much easier and faster to just log off and log on in the morning than to shut completely down and have to completely restart.
 
Spectrum17 said:
I turn off my home computer at night because it is in the bedroom and the flashing lights from sleep mode would bother me.

At work I feel guilty for wasting the power by leaving it on (I turn off the monitor though), but I do anyway because when I do shut it off half the time it will lose my profile and it is a pain in the ass to restore my settings. It's also much easier and faster to just log off and log on in the morning than to shut completely down and have to completely restart.
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That's just like I do it also. Only shutting down my computer at work for weekends if I don't have duty.
 
Its a choice between closing 20+ windows, or Windows key + L.

Windows key + L wins.
 
At my office we have recently begun "going green" which involves experimenting with hibernation/standby mode and wake-on-lan features. The pc's are scheduled to turn at on certain hours to receive their updates, then turn back off again. It's about the best of both worlds, keeping the pc's off as much as possible while still getting all their patches and virus updates and so forth. Unfortunately windows is a piece of crap in this department and numerous pc's fail to come back from hibernation properly. They just boot up, and sit there at a black screen requiring you to hit the recent button. Then windows tells you it failed to recover from hibernation and to delete the hibernation data and cold boot. Other machines seem to be spontaneously coming out of hibernation on their own for no reason.

So ultimately the whole thing will probably be abandoned because technology hasnt caught up yet.
 
wiseoracle said:
There is, it's called WOL - Wake up on LAN. Enable it on every PC, and have it set to wake up at 6am, update, and by the time employees get there, their PCs are already on to work at 8am.
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I suppose we could do something like that, but it would have to be more like 3am since some guys start shortly after 5.

Taking an opposite approach, would it be possible for users to leave their machines on, they update at around 6PM or so, then are told to shut down/hibernate/whatever? Everyone around here has been in "leave it on" mode for so long, I'm guessing many would forget to shut their machines down.
 
Sorry, but doing this interrupts my Folding.

That and I am having a weird issue where if I shut the computer off, then turn it back on, it loads up then just goes to a black screen. If I reset it, however, it goes to my desktop just fine.

And for every person out there who thinks Folding is a waste of time/money/resources/ whatever, I'm just going to Fold harder to piss you off. At least I'm trying to do something better for human kind. The world's already fucked - we live on it. Least I could do is give hope to a potential less idiotic generation than our own.
 
I wish I could but it just makes my room to damn hot. And I can't sleep in the heat.
 
All this makes me want to plug in more pc's that arent being used. What if I am getting my power from a nuke plant? And if I am getting my power from something that puts CO2 into the air... then that just means that more plant life will live in my part of the world.

The current "green" movement isnt about the planet, its about taxation and control of economies.
 
NKDietrich said:
Nope, most of the power here is hydroelectric the rest is traditional co-generating plants. :p There was a nuclear plant in my area but it did not supply power on this side of the river, and it was demolished some time ago.
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Nope to you. You've left home, and some power company you've directly or indirectly paid either generates or buys nuclear power. You might be close to zero, but you're not True Zero:p.

Don't worry though, the more normal power you use, the more you shrik your relative uranium footprint and turn it into a coal/water footprint. That one makes you easier to track in the daytime, whereas the uranium footprints are easier to follow at night!
 
Renegade_Azzy said:
The current "green" movement isnt about the planet, its about taxation and control of economies.
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That attitude is not factually supported nor accurate. If you think that using fossil fuels as much as we want to is not going to cause problems and that it's for 'taxation and control of economies' you're not paying attention.

Take global warming/greenhouse gasses and all that out of the picture entirely since some people want to believe that sometimes climate change happens in 100 years instead of thousands of years. Let's just leave that out altogether.

So now you have a fixed amount of several non-renewable resources without valid replacements. Meanwhile the consumption of those resources increases exponentially in relation to population. See a problem yet?

I personally don't mind too much if the ocean water levels rise a little bit or if the ozone dissolves a little bit. I mind a lot more about Mad Max becoming real if the world manages to run ourselves out of oil/gas before there's another technology to support us with. The green team is my ally in that ideal even if for different motives, but they are my ally. Plus less power used with the same amount available can be a cause of lower prices for the power you actually use-that's a good thing too.
 
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