Cost to leave PC on 24/7

[geoff]

In message , John writes

As an aside (we did this thread to death a few weeks back)

are you on-line too i.e. are you a hackers dream ?

[geoff]

In message , nightjar writes

Eleven fans for what ?

I have one in the psu and one on the 2 gig processor - which does the job. If the processor begins to get too hot, it should shut down

do you have a fan fetish or what ?

[geoff]

In message , IMM writes

Google is even your friend John

[Dave Plowman]

Don't most CD roms ignore the processor and simply add the audio to the computer sound buss?

The 586 card on my RPC doesn't see it that way. ;-)

Yup.

[nightjar]

The CPU, the chipset, the on-board secondary power supply and the video card all have their own heatsinks, with attached fans. There is one in the case side, directly over the CPU. Then two in the PSU, two in the front of the case blowing air in (over the hard drives) and two in the back taking air out.

I don't particularly want it to shut down and a 3.2 GHz P4 runs rather hotter. A couple of the fans are redundant, but I want reliability and fans are cheap enough that it is silly to risk a failure if one goes down.

Colin Bignell

[David Hearn]

I would suggest something similar to what other's have suggested.

I believe some (most?) motherboards support turning on at a certain time as set in the BIOS. With this, you can get the machine to turn itself on at

5pm (ready for you to get home and listen to music in the evening) and then set the machine to go into standby after 3 hours and hibernate after 5 hours (assuming you use Windows W2k/XP). This would mean that if you didn't use the machine for 3 hours, it would save electricity by going into standby, and after 5 hours (not 3+5 hours, just 5 hours) it would turn itself off. If you went to bed at 11pm and used it at that point, it would hibernate and turn itself off at 4am (worst case). You'd save minimum 4am - 5pm electricity, which would half the electricity bill for running it. If you didn't use it one evening, it would turn itself off at 10pm (5 hours after startup) and save you a further 6 hours of electricity. And, assuming you have W2k/XP and a motherboard that supports power on at certain times, you can do this for free.

If your motherboard doesn't support this, then you can just put the PC on a small timeclock and get it to turn the power off from 4pm to 5pm. As the machine would have shut itself down by those times, you should be safe, and having it powered (timeclock powering it) but turned off should be safe. All you'd be using it to do is to apply power to start the machine. Oh, and you'd need to set your BIOS to turn on when power is applied, rather than stay off.

Of course, all these things add some risk (ie. Windows going barmy and not hibernating and having power taken whilst its running, and also recurring quick power-cuts turning the machine off, and on repeatedly over a few seconds which has been known to cause problems).

Hope that may be useful to you.

D

[Barry Young]

Dave Plowman wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Replying to the wrong bit of this thread, but anyway. Just out of curiosity I googled for "DOS MP3 player" and came up with this

reckon you should just install DOS (okay, maybe Windows 98 booting straight into a DOS prompt so you've got some chance of being able to see your HDs properly) and stick the whole thing on a timeswitch. DOS doesn't care if you just turn the power off.

[usenet]

No, the normal thing now is that you have either two meters and a time switch which selects which meter runs or a new fangled electronic meter which has two sets of numbers.

[Andy Hall]

If it's a straight audio track as you would have on an audio CD, then the audio comes through the small 4 way connector as analogue audio and is mixed into the analogue path of the sound card - hence the small coax cable. Some CDROM drives also have digital fibre optic outputs for audio.

If the audio is by way of a data file (e.g. mp3, Real, Microsoft, wav,... ) then it is handled via a codec which is generally implemented in software and hence requiring CPU cycles. Some sound cards have digital signal processing which may help with this, although generally the DSP facilities are for synthesis - e.g. with MIDI files etc.

Generally, audio codecs, especially on decompression for playing are not that CPU onerous. Video is a different game, however, especially for compression, and hardware assist or a lot of CPU power is generally needed for good results.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[R W]

Unless they are IBM Death^H^H^Hskstar drives.

IBM actually advise against leaving them running permanently. They claim they are designed for home/small office use, and to be powered down when not in use.

[R W]

Not worth the hassle of cygwin.

Just use a windows AT job or system scheduler job, with a tool like psshutdown from

[R W]

Which is why I've got timeswitches for the dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer.

Has the advantage that you can set them so the programmes finish just as you are getting up so that clothes in the laundry machines don't sit there getting creased and metal baking trays in the dryer don't go rusty because they can be removed almost as soon as the programme has finished.

[usenet]

Many new[ish] washing machines, dishwashers, etc. have a delay facility built in. This was one of the major criteria for our last washing machine and dishwasher purchases. It's less hassle than a separate timeswitch and many modern appliances won't start when turned on 'from cold', they need the electricity to be connected to be able to set the program etc.

However it can make nightbird children jump, my daughter was creeping through the kitchen in the wee small hours one night and said she just about died of fright when the dishwash burst into life all by itself!

[John Rumm]

This is often the case. Note however that with most modern PCs these days (i.e. with WinXP) the default CD Audio setup makes use of a modern CD ROM drives capability to do Direct Audio Extraction (DAE) over the IDE bus.

Hence CD playback is achieved by sucking raw sample data off the audio CD and then playing back through the PCs DACs as it would a .wav file. (this gives the PC chance to do pre-processing of the audio (like Media Player's "SRS WOW effects" and also to use the digital audio data to drive the various "visulisations").

[John Rumm]

If the cooling is good enough to run it for half an hour, then its good enough to run 24/7 (a modern CPU with heatsink and fan will be up to full temp in a few mins).

[ignored]

Oooops. Thanks.

I only ever saw E-7 wiring once - when renting a farmhouse on Anglesey. Someone had got the timer clocks out by 12 hours which caused a mess with us paying up at the end of the week.

[geoff]

In message , nightjar writes

Do you measure computer activity on the Beaufort scale then ?

[ignored]

In message , R W writes

errrm, you dry baking trays in a TD - doesn't that wake you up?

[Witchy]

After the thread I started the other week about PC consumption I've decided to leave both of mine on permanently, particularly since we've just had an electricity bill and it's identical (ish) to previous quarters when the second machine wasn't on so much....

-- cheers,

witchy/binarydinosaurs