S3 Standby State Done Right

For Earth Day, Cameron Butterfield has written in with a pointer to his article on how to get your Windows PC into S3 sleep, and why you want to. It covers the question of how to take advantage of this extremely low-power mode even when your machine is an "always on" file server, remote desktop, or VNC server.

Comments

Logic is lacking here

[Master of Transhuman]

From TFA:

" * I calculated (24 hours per day) * 30 days a week = 720 hours
        * Power bills are generally measured in kilowatt hours or "kW/h"s. Power rates might be as much as $0.12 per kW/h.
        * Our total cost of having the computer on 24/7 for the month in this scenario would be as follows:
        * .4 kW (400watts) * 720 Hours * $0.12kW/h = $34.56

That kind of money could pay for a cell phone! If you want to save some cash, keep on reading."

Er, excuse me. If your machine is not running for 720 hours at a cost of $35/month, I would suggest you dump the machine - since you aren't using it.

And if you ARE using it, then you're NOT paying $35/month for NOTHING, right?

How much of that time is the machine idle, and what does THAT time cost? Maybe $5, $10 - $1.95?

At least, he could have calculated the eight hours it presumably is not doing anything when he is asleep - unless of course his system is set to run virus scans and download updates (or run cron jobs) during that time?

Personally I don't think a computer should ever be idle - but it's admittedly hard to find things for it to do that don't require supervision in many cases.

I'm not against energy conservation, but like most environmental issues, I suspect there are more important things to worry about than whether consumer computers are sleeping or not. Given the reputed energy bill in Google's new data centers back East, I'd say that probably overshadows most of the consumer machines in that state. And since Intel is forecasting everybody using massively parallel data centers to provide computing services in the future, maybe the energy cost of that should be considered - especially since you will STILL need a consumer computer - albeit maybe a small, low power one - to ACCESS those data centers. And the more portable it is, the smaller the energy source - as in hard-to-dispose of safely old batteries?

As usual, all of this is oversimplified by the environmentalists.