KRBland
Sat Jul 31 15:00:15 CDT 2004
Your question is a timely one and was just raised on an AP news website,
from which I have extracted the text and deleted the pictures and ads.
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Q. I've heard that frequently turning my computer on and off can hurt the
performance of internal parts. But I don't want to leave it on all the time
either and waste power. What's the best course?
A. While it once might have been true that computer hard drives or
power-supply systems could be degraded over time by turning the machines on
and off, there's little reason now not to go the green (and money-saving)
route: Shut things completely down if you're not going to be using your PC
for many hours.
Recent tests at Canada's University of Waterloo found that computers with
Pentium 4 processors running at 1.7 gigahertz drew 110 watts of electricity
while booting up and 60 watts when they were on but idle. A 17-inch
cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor added an additional 75 watts. Newer,
flat-screen LCD monitors use about half as much juice as CRTs.
In a sense, then, the PC isn't a big juice hog. A microwave oven devours
electricity at a rate of 750 to 1,100 watts, according to the U.S.
Department of Energy.
PCs in power-saving standby or sleep mode have even less of a presence. In
the Waterloo tests, they were draining 35 watts. That's roughly equivalent
to three clock radios.
But add up hours of standby time, and multiply that by the millions of
computers in the world, and it is some serious electricity.
In fact, microchip maker Infineon Technologies AG (IFX
<
http://money.excite.com/jsp/qt/full.jsp?time=0&symbol_search_text=IFX>),
which is working on making electronics' sleep modes more energy-efficient,
estimates that a mere 1 percent decrease in standby power consumption would
save the nation 360 megawatts - the equivalent of a medium-sized power
plant. Put another way, 10 percent of an average home's electricity
consumption comes from machines of some kind sitting on standby, said
Infineon spokesman Saswato Das.
Dell Inc., the world's leading seller of PCs, has no official position on
whether its customers should leave the machines running or not. Leaving
computers on all the time doesn't erode their performance, but it doesn't
appear that turning them off and on does either, because the reliability of
key parts has improved significantly, spokesman Lionel Menchaca said.
"There used to be a bigger difference in terms of wear and tear when you
power up your PC, but it's not as much of an issue now," Menchaca said.
After the tests at Waterloo, Manfred Grisebach of the university's
information systems and technology group pointed out that hard drives that
never get shut down seem to live a long time. But, he said, so do drives
that get shut off all the time.
"What we can't say is which last longer," he said.
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Ken Bland