 redxiiPremium,Mod
join:2001-02-26
Sherwood, MI
Suddenlink
ISDN
Fiber Optic
Broadband Tweaks
/dev/null
1 edit | reply to vaxvms
Re: Why is it bad to reboot a Windows PC? Usually to boast about uptime. Or maybe something really important is running.
I usually sleep or hibernate my computer (desktop doesn't support hibernate in Win 7 but does S3 sleep). I used to be one of those always-on people but realized it's just a plain waste of power/money. The desktop is connected to a UPS so I'm not worry about power outages. |
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 vaxvmsferroequine fanPremium
join:2005-03-01
Wormtown | reply to vaxvms
Clarification:
powering off = clean system shutdown (Start>Shut Down) resulting in no power to MoBo. Not Sleep. Not Hibernate.
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i before e, except after c... weird? |
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Reviews:
 ·AT&T Southwest
| reply to plencnerb
said by plencnerb:Now in the case of the older OS's (95, 98, 98se and ME) this was the case. If you did not reboot often enough, your system would grind to a crawl.
However, I feel that problem is no longer an issue.
Microsoft and Dell, both, have support articles that state restarting a Windows computer fixes most issues (or words to that affect). The only Windows box we have, for testing web sites, frequently gets rebooted because it slows to a crawl after a week or two of heavy testing. This was true when it was a XP box and it's true now that it's Vista. |
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davePremium,MVM
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio
kudos:8 | reply to Doctor Olds
Users should not press the power button or restart the computer while Windows is still running unless there is an issue with the computer.
It's easy to see. Press button. Note how screen says something to the effect of 'shutting down'.
That link references Windows 98, so it's old (and I can't recall whether the stated info was true for Windows 98 - probably not, since '98 was the first Windows with ACPI support). But it also references XP, so the site is managed by an incompetent know-nothing. |
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Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
 ·WildBlue
| said by dave:This is archaic nonsense. Since the late 20th century (say, 1998) Wintel PCs have implemented a soft power button that, when pressed, sends an indication to the OS, which responds by doing a clean shutdown.
If I remember correctly hitting the power button does a "quick" shutdown on XP and earlier. It closes all open files (not saving changes) and then shuts the machine off. It does not do the long shutdown where processes are stopped and things are unloaded from memory. There was something about if you had unsaved work you could loose it because you do not get prompted if you want to save the file. This also caused an explosion of temp files.
Apparently there was a change on Vista and later (in programs that support it) if the file has already been given a file name it will be automatically saved during shut down. (The shutdown is a lot more graceful as well.)
My preference for getting around this possible issue was to change the power button press to hibernate rather than shutdown on XP.
Problem is that hibernate did not always work gracefully on XP and if you have lots of ram (2-3gig) it can take some time to load it all back into memory from a slow hard drive. |
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 psafuxPremium,VIP
join:2005-11-10
kudos:2 | reply to vaxvms
said by vaxvms:I do not understand these aversions. My question to these people is Why do you feel it is wrong to restart the Windows operating system? Why the adamant attitude about it?
aside from situations were servers are involved I would be at a loss to explain the reasoning. When I am working on a system that is acting oddly, one of the first things I do is check system uptime. Rebooting has solved many issues. |
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Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| reply to LLigetfa
said by LLigetfa:said by dave:There's an equally vocal bunch of people that say you should always shut computers down rather than suspend or hibernate.
Windows is buggy and reboots are often called for. The first thing I always do when I get a support ticket from one of my users is to check the uptime. Most often a simple reboot fixes whatever is their issue. Often I refuse to work on the ticket if the user refuses to reboot. +100000000.
Dave
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I may have been born yesterday. But it wasn't at night. |
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LLigetfa
join:2006-05-15
Fort Frances, ON
kudos:1 |  |
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Reviews:
·Comcast
| reply to Aranarth
said by Aranarth:I do recommend shutting machines off every night.
Even though sleep does use very little power being off uses even less.
If you have an older machine that is very slightly unstable or one that becomes unstable after a while because of memory leaks (looks at firefox) then rebooting will give you a fresh state every morning.
Other than that if it works perfectly for weeks on end using sleep, feel free to do that.
Alternatively you could use hibernate.
Some machines also do not like being in sleep and loosing power. So if you do let the machine go to sleep be sure to save all your work just in case. You could also use win7's hybrid sleep so the machine might be sleeping but if yu loose power it will boot up like it was hibernating.
The amount of savings in energy will be outweighed by the shortened lifespan of the computer caused by that many thermal cycles IMHO.
When someone asks me if they should turn the PC off when not in use I ask them this.:
Do you use it daily?
If their answer is yes I advise them to leave it on all the time.
If they only use it every so often then I advise them to turn it off when not in use.
Chips, don't like to heat up then cool down too much.
They last longer when they remain at a constant temp.
Power save mode is a better option.
Dave
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I may have been born yesterday. But it wasn't at night. |
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 OctaveanPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-31
New York, NY
kudos:1
2 edits | reply to vaxvms
Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again?
***edit***
Too bad about that, youtube doesn't seem to have a clip of "the IT crowd" saying "Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again?". Not one you can link to anyway. |
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vaxvmsferroequine fanPremium
join:2005-03-01
Wormtown Reviews:
·Charter
| reply to workablob
said by workablob:Chips, don't like to heat up then cool down too much.
They last longer when they remain at a constant temp.
Power save mode is a better option.
The chips are kept warm when in power save?
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i before e, except after c... weird? |
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LLigetfa
join:2006-05-15
Fort Frances, ON
kudos:1 | reply to Octavean
quote:
This video contains content from Fremantle International, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.
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Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it. -- Stephen Vizinczey |
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Reviews:
·Comcast
| reply to vaxvms
said by vaxvms:said by workablob:Chips, don't like to heat up then cool down too much.
They last longer when they remain at a constant temp.
Power save mode is a better option.
The chips are kept warm when in power save? Probably not. I honestly don't know.
It's just speculation that sleep might put less stress on the PC than a full power off.
Good question.
Dave
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I may have been born yesterday. But it wasn't at night. |
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 davidgGood Bye My FriendPremium,MVM
join:2002-06-15
none | reply to vaxvms
i have a Win 2000 machien that has not had a reboot in several years, 2008 is the last one i know of. Also have a vista machine that until about 2 weeks ago had not been rebooted since about tha tsame time. These 2 machines run a mail server and act as serial to IP converters for linking some of our phone switches so no one uses them to browse/game/etc. my Win 7 laptop i usually hibernate but about every 3 weeks i have to do a reboot because it won't go into hibernation.
BTW, we also have a Win98 laptop at work that has not been shut down in months.
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Lack of Preparation on YOUR Part does NOT Constitute an Emergency on Mine! |
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scross
join:2002-09-13
Cordova, TN | reply to dave
said by dave:said by LLigetfa:Windows is buggy and reboots are often called for. Apparently you must be using a different 'Windows' than I am. Between work and home, I never reboot except for Windows updates that require it. This seems to reinforce vaxvms  's implicit point that there's a lot of superstition involved. On the corporate systems (desktops and laptops) that I used to have, I almost never rebooted them unless it was absolutely necessary, and I had far fewer problems in general that most of my coworkers did, who would shut theirs down at the end of the day and reboot in the morning. But these were just running the standard corporate stuff - Office, Outlook, terminal emulators, and so on.
For general computing use at home, though, where I might run any number of things, I've found that in many cases the only way to ensure a stable system (or to recover one that has become unstable) is to reboot it, so I do this on a regular basis. But I've also come to expect these systems not to always reboot cleanly, and to sometimes instead exhibit truly bizarre behavior, as Windows is so wont to do. |
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vaxvmsferroequine fanPremium
join:2005-03-01
Wormtown Reviews:
·Charter
| said by scross:... and I had far fewer problems in general that most of my coworkers did, who would shut theirs down at the end of the day and reboot in the morning.
Can you elaborate on the type of problems your coworkers had that you didn't? Hardware? Software? Lost (destroyed/damaged) files? How often? |
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scross
join:2002-09-13
Cordova, TN | reply to vaxvms
When it comes to physically turning off electronic equipment, in theory whenever you switch it back on you're taking a little bit of life out of it, due to things like inrush currents and such. This of course depends on how well the unit is made (manufacturers would never cut corners just to save a few pennies, would they?) and what the overall expected life of the unit is, anyway, compared to what its maximum theoretical life might be (that is, you may end up replacing the unit for other reasons, well before the negative effects of power cycling it start to show up). A typical effect of inrush current that we all see frequently is how incandescent bulbs so often burn out when we first switch them on, versus their burning out during normal use.
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inrush_current
Someone has already mentioned thermal cycling. This was a really big problem back in the day when chips sat in chip sockets, because thermal cycling tended to cause them to creep backwards out of their sockets; but since most chips these days are either soldered in or locked into their sockets (CPUs and such), this is less of a problem. Solder joints and even copper traces can still crack, though, and any connectors are still subject to loosening, unless they are physically locked in place (many aren't). I've had to fix my share of all of these problems over the years. |
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vaxvmsferroequine fanPremium
join:2005-03-01
Wormtown | reply to vaxvms
Real life is far from a theoretical world.
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i before e, except after c... weird? |
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scross
join:2002-09-13
Cordova, TN
1 edit | reply to vaxvms
said by vaxvms:said by scross:... and I had far fewer problems in general that most of my coworkers did, who would shut theirs down at the end of the day and reboot in the morning.
Can you elaborate on the type of problems your coworkers had that you didn't? Hardware? Software? Lost (destroyed/damaged) files? How often? Well, let's see, it's been a few years now, and because I so often heard them complaining about this I eventually just got to the point where I didn't ask for the details, and instead would say "Just do what I do and put it in standby!" And then new corporate security policies were put into place that forced systems into standby mode after a short amount of inactive time anyway, which kind of rendered the whole thing moot, and people just stopped turning them off. Then new corporate policies were issued about turning equipment off in order to save power, but by that time I was working at home (meaning that the standby and power policies didn't really apply to me) and I wasn't really privy to the problems my coworkers were still having.
But here are some things I do remember, because I still run into them on occasion myself. One of my coworkers was religious about shutting her system down at the end of the day - using correct procedures - only to all-too-often have it hang at the shutdown screen and just sit there forever and ever and ever (it should be noted here that if this happens and you wait long enough, the system will often go ahead and eventually shut itself down, but there is no guarantee of this). Since she was in a hurry (had to pick up her kids or whatever), she would ask me to keep an eye on it to make sure that it did eventually shut down, but as often as not after having it sit there for ages (sometimes hours) I would have to hold the power button in order to make it go down. And she eventually got to the point where she wouldn't wait more than a few minutes before she resorted to this, too. Oddly enough, I almost never had this problem, even though we were using identical equipment, running almost identical software, were on the same network, and so on.
Another issue that they ran into (and I still do on occasion) is when the systems were coming back up. Since almost everything today is networked, when Windows is coming back up and has some problem with network connectivity, all too often instead of just saying this and moving on, it will hang there with a blank or unresponsive screen. In a corporate environment with lots of network connections and Windows (and other) servers and password policies that may have forced server passwords to have expired overnight, this can and did cause some really nasty problems at times. I still run into this at home on occasion, and it can be a real problem on the road when my laptop is out of its element and can't connect to my network. Things tend to run smoother here if I don't power down, but sometimes I have to anyway (airline rules and such), and in those cases it can take an inordinate amount of time to just get to (or to get past) the Windows login screen when it is coming back up.
Another issue with laptops is battery charging. Very often if the battery charge is low, the laptop will simply refuse to power back up after being powered down, even when it is plugged into an outlet. The trick here usually is to remove the battery, then power the laptop up without it, then reinstall the battery. Situations like this can be made worse by people who always leave their laptops plugged in and never really use the battery, because that can sometimes lead to the battery dying an earlier death than usual. |
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davePremium,MVM
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio
kudos:8 | reply to scross
said by scross:But I've also come to expect these systems not to always reboot cleanly, and to sometimes instead exhibit truly bizarre behavior, as Windows is so wont to do.
Yeah, this is another of those things that apparently happens to every Windows user except me.
(I assume it's because I'm fairly discriminating in what I'll install) |
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