Monitors and power draw

[Jerry Feldman]

There is always the opinions, It has long been a practice in the computer 
industry to keep computers on 24X7. (Mainly because they were afraid 
the computers would never be able to reboot). 
The more sane  argument is that the temperature changes damage the 
equipment, so that frequent power/on power/off cycles will shorten the life 
of the equipment. PC shops generally turn their computers off because 
Windows would never last the night without requiring a reboot. 
Unix and VMS shops rarely turned off their desktop computers. Actually, 
when I was working for HP at Raytheon, we were not allowed to turn off 
our workstations. (And for the most part only the system management 
team knew the root passwords). 

In any event, with most of the systems we have today along with the 
power management stuff keeping stuff on 24x7 should not be a major 
cost issue. 
On 16 Nov 2001, at 10:54, David Kramer wrote:

> I go to the other extreme as most people.  Since I'm into all the home
> automation stuff, I bring in a motion sensor and trigger my monitor and
> fan off of it.  They stay on for 20 minutes after the last movement
> sensed, to prevent bonking the monitor off and on every time I went for
> another caffeine injection or to speak to someone.

Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org