On Monday 11 October 2004 8:15 am, Chris Green wrote:
You have to be very careful though that you're not having more environmental impact by reducing the life of your hardware as that may have just as much environmental effect (manufacturing etc.) as you're saving by turning it off.
An interesting point, It's true that temperature/voltage cycling can reduce the life expectancy of some components. That said consumer level machines and workstations "should" be designed to cope with this.
I've never been sure about which lasts longer, machines left on all the time or machines that are powered on/off regularly
Certainly my previous machine managed 3 years or more with no hardware failures, and that was on 24/7
I *always* turn monitors off but one of my systems does run 24 hours.
This really bugs me, there is a reasonable excuse for leaving machines switched on, but why do people not turn off monitors (or at least set up power management to standby the monitor after a period of inactivity).
Not only do you have the whole waste of energy thing, but CRT's (and even the backlight on LCD's) have a finite life.
This is also why I hate screensavers, why have the computer display some fancy image after 20 mins of inactivity when it is just as easy to tell the monitor to shut down.