Main > Main Forum

How do I get my cabinet to turn on?

Pages: << < (6/6)

Richard_Nixon:

Sorry, double post. :dizzy:

ChrisK:

The only sure protection against lightning is to unplug.  No equipment any of us will own will protect against a direct strike.  Certainly not a power strip or UPS.  That said, equipment that is powered off is generally a little more resistant to damage than powered-on equipment.  Power supplies don't like sags, and lightning can do more than just spike.  (ie: a lightning strike on a substation.)

About the power draw, I agree it's wasted power, but how much?  My monitor draws ~3W in stand-by.  My PC is a C2D laptop set to spin down its hard drive... that probably pulls 5W or so on stand-by.  My speakers are obviously an offender, but I'm planning to swap those out for ones with a remote power/volume control (using the PC volume control crashes Daphne on me for some reason).  Ignoring the speakers I can't imagine I'm burning more than 10W.  That does add up over the years, but I'm not really too worried about that level of power use.

I'm not advocating for leaving the computer on all the time; your usage pattern might be different than mine.  Just saying it's an alternative that's not all that crazy.  It works good for me right now, cause I'm doing a lot of setup and play at the moment.


bkenobi:

If the power is switched off, then components will not be in the path of the lightening.  If they are on, they have a direct path.  If the computer is plugged in and turned off, the PSU will be in danger, certainly, but components like the HDD are less at risk.

Lightening protection is a joke.  The circuitry that is used to detect lightening is so slow in comparison to the actual strike that the damaging spike is already through the surge protector by the time it shuts off.  This spike can be millions of amps in a direct strike  or thousands + in an indirect one.  Closing the barn door after the animals escape... you know.

I'm not saying that you will survive perfectly fine if you have your machine off.  I'm saying that the components in the machine should be less likely to be damaged if they are not powered on.  But, you are correct that in sleep mode (when the motherboard is in a power saver on mode) is very close to being off.  In this state, the RAM is saved to disk, right?  Thus, if the power goes out, there is no loss of any kind.  I was thinking more of the low power state (hybernation?) where the system is still on, the fans are still running, etc.  I believe that's how I have my office computers set up so they wake in a second with a mouse movement.  Sleep still goes through the boot cycle, right?

Richard_Nixon:

In hibernation, the ram is dumped to the hard drive and shut down, then reloaded to ram when booted. It does go through some kind of boot cycle, but a fraction of what a cold boot/reset cycle is. Hibernation is  basically "off". There is still some parasitic drains possible if you have them set in your BIOS, like boot from ethernet or keyboard. Wakeing from hibernation takes way less time than a cold boot, but not as fast as sleep.

In standby, the ram is kept active along with some other minor circuits on the motherboard, and depending on BIOS settings as well, you'll have the parasitic drains I mentioned earlier. Everything else is off, CPU, HD, Video card, etc. Fans should not be running, unless the power supply is too old to recognize the sleep command. Moving the mouse to wake from sleep takes only seconds.

I'm thinking at your office you have the power settings set to shut everything off without actually telling the system to sleep or hibernate. Most computer components can be shut off without having to actually turn the computer off (fans continue to run, but can be slowed down).

ChrisK:

In Windows terms, there's two routes to go with sleep:

Sleep: Computer is on, but many components are in a low power state.  The CPU is clocked way down, the monitor is in low power standby (or off), the speakers likely have no power, USB ports may or may not be powered off, and PCI slots may be set to a low power state.  A lot of this is configurable in Windows, right down to the individual USB port.  Every PC is different as to what it does in sleep mode because some hardware doesn't handle low power sleep very well.  You'll often see USB hard drives or "weird" hardware like webcams or attached cell phones have trouble coming out of sleep.  Many devices simply don't sleep if they have this trouble.  (I can tell you some horror stories from work.... ugh.)  Usually laptops are really good at this (because they have to!) and desktops are less good.  This mode can use as little as a few watts if all your equipment powers down nicely, or quite a bit of power if, say, your video card is power-hungry and won't go to sleep.

Hibernate: Computer is off.  When you tell Windows to hibernate it writes its RAM to a file (c:\hiberfile.sys) and powers fully off.  When you turn the PC back on, Windows reads this file back into RAM and theoretically you're back to the exact state you were before, just like an emulator's save state feature.  In reality you'll also sometimes have trouble with some hardware, usually because it wasn't expecting time to have passed while you had the computer powered off.  As far as the drivers/software knew the computer's clock just jumped ahead a day or so after coming out of hibernation.  Common problems are hard drives spinning up then back down or monitors not waking up properly.

I guess the third way is to just turn the screen off and let everything run.  I do this with my desktop computer because it does transfers and updates and such in the background all the time, but it's very inefficient for a computer that is genuinely unused when idle.


Pages: << < (6/6)

Go to full version