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Five PC Power Myths Debunked
snydeq writes "Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies between $25 and $75 per PC per year, according to Energy Star, savings that can add up quickly for large organizations. Yet most organizations remain behind the times on PC power management, in large part due to common misperceptions about PC power, writes InfoWorld's Ted Samson, who outlines five PC power myths debunked in a recent report from Forrester, ranging from the energy savings of screen savers, to the energy draw of powering up, to the difficulties of issuing patches to systems in lower-power states."
this article was written by a self-aware PC who is tired of the human race's waste of time and energy.
My favorite line from TFA is the last one: "The Forrester report "How Much Monday are Your Idle PCs Wasting?" is available for $279." Please raise your hands if you know someone who would buy that!
Energy is kWh power is kW. "Energy at a rate" is power, and should be in kW not kWh.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
In the winter I leave my computers on. I don't think I am "loosing" any energy that way since it's used to heat my house.
>>>"Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies between $25 and $75 per PC per year"
How am I supposed to download last night's episodes of Smallville and Supernatural if I have my PC turned off during the day? Jeez. Insensitive clod. ;-)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
If you spend 10 mins per day turning you pc on and setting up your work environment, and 5 mins closing everything, the cost of your time spent on this task will negate $25 saved ten times.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
[citation needed]
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Myth No. 1 really hurts to read. I'm not sure there is a single instance there where the units of power and energy are used correctly.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies a substantial sum. In fact, Energy Star estimates organizations can save from $25 to $75 per PC per year with PC power management
Lets assume each PC has a user who is paid at least $25000 per year. We can clearly see the savings on the cost of that employee and thier PC setup caused by this are negligable.
he Forrester report does acknowledge that end-users have very little patience for downtime. However, it suggests that "potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management."
Complaints or not the company is paying for any user downtime.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
i thought this was about power pc, damn.
he who controls the spice controls the universe
. . . as if millions of Folding@Home and Seti@Home clients suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
All through college I left my PC on 24/7, however now that I'm paying the bill I have thermal throttling and the other new power-saving standards all turned on, and I turn everything off (router, modem and all) entirely when I'm not using it. It's odd the way people look at it; at work some users say "Well I never leave it on at night because I know that it makes the computer die quicker" and some people say "Well I never turn it off because I want it to last longer." I think the truth is that modern hardware really can handle both philosophies and it's just a matter of convenience vs. power costs at this point.
"potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management."
Now that just plain hilarious.
Sites like Blackle suggest that a black screen saves energy. May have been true for CRT displays, but modern TFT Displays always have the backlight on, even on a black screen.
Learn how to save $25 to $75 by purchasing the $279 dollar report that the article is hawking. No thanks. This article has no business even being on Slashdot. It isn't news, it is an advert.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
so if I have staff making $10.00 an hour shutdown and restart their computer each day (time I have to pay them for mind)- I can save how much a year?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
1.42kw for the computer to run overnight has a cost of around 10 cents to the company.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
It costs the company at least 5 times as much to have you boot your PC in the morning as it does to let it run overnight.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
From TFA:
The Forrester report "How Much Monday are Your Idle PCs Wasting?" is available for $279.
(And if you can sell common sense for $279 a pop, I'm in the wrong business.)
I agree that you can save power with low-power (standby) modes on your PCs.
However, as a network admin as a mid-sized company, I also have seen loads of frustrations where PCs (both laptops and desktops) don't come out of power save mode cleanly, requiring a reboot. Wake-on-lan is also a great concept, but also pretty buggy (again...in my limited experience trying to implement it). We also have issues where our client systems are using network applications with license pools (e.g. database applications or CAD packages). When a user leaves one of these applications open, then the PC goes into power save mode...it really freaks out when it comes back out of power save mode since the license server thought the system had released the license, but the client still thinks it has a licens in use. This situation usually results in the need to reboot, which frustrates the users to no end.
I set all of our PCs here to lock and send only the monitor into low-power mode after 20 minutes or so. Then we don't have the problems with coming out of power save mode and having locked up or frozen applications (especially the aforementioned network applictions), but still save a good bit of power by allowing the monitor to be turned off automatically.
Anyone have any idea what percentage of power is used by the monitor versus the PC itself? I don't have a clue, but I'd bet it's a pretty good percentage. There's also probably a big difference between CRT monitors and LCD monitors...again, my gut feeling, but I can't cite any numbers.
Later,
JS
so if I don't buy the report ($279) I can leave my PC on?
S3 is such a nice feature. My wife never powers down her computer all the way any more, just suspends it to RAM, in seconds, and the boot up is just as fast. That said, the last 2 motherboards I've used, while technically support S3, are unable to suspend without immediately waking up. I've done my homework on it and no matter what I do, it won't stay suspended (unplugged all USB and network cables, only had a monitor and ps/2 keyboard and it still doesn't suspend). Does anyone know of any websites that have a list of motherboards that properly implement S3 mode?
If you refuse to let the company manage your PC's power use, your annual raise will be docked $75-$100 to compensate for you not being a team player by insisting that your work is sooooo important that you couldn't leave your PC even in sleep mode at night when you're at home. The percentage of corporate PC users who need to leave their PCs on overnight probably never goes above 1%.
I wrote a pretty cool screen saver years ago.
I used x,y,z coordinate equation for a sphere and added extra multipliers, exponents, and divisors, then I change the variables around on each iteration, then draw a wire-frame of the shape made.
I made it so friggin' complicated that I could not reduce it to a set of matrix operations (remember linear algebra?).
No worries, I brute-forced every long-arse calculation and it works great!
Now I use my screen saver as a load tester when overclocking. It really works the heck out of the CPU and GPU. A good screen saver (looks cool), but not very practical.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Of the four instances in which watts were referenced (directly or in compound units), three are completely boneheadedly wrong:
They should be:
You *can't* call it a typo when they are perfectly backward in three out of four incidents. And you can't call it "They just got it backward..." when they got it right once. You must conclude, therefore, that they have almost no grasp whatsoever of units.
FTA: Modern computers are designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles before failure
With all the reboots required, that means I am limited to three Vista reinstalls?
The full article can apparently be purchase for the low cost of $279.00 ... wow
"Myth No. 5: My PC users will not tolerate any downtime for power management.
The Forrester report does acknowledge that end-users have very little patience for downtime. However, it suggests that "potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management.""
I love this kind of response. It's pretty much ignoring the problem. PC users will not tolerate any downtime for power management even if you "educate" them. This is trying to wave the problems away and it won't work.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Any modern PC can S3 suspend.
S3 suspend cuts power use by 95% and the PC resumes *INSTANTLY*.
I can S3 suspend my laptop and have it run off the battery for over a week - open it up and I am back where I left off in about 2-3 seconds.
There is no argument against having an IT policy MANDATING S3 suspend. Hell you can even automate it to do it by default every day at 6 PM unless the PC is in use (easily checked by screensaver APIs).
TFA would be a whole lot more credible if the author didn't mix up energy and energy rates:
A watt is a rate, and it is meaningless unless it is multiplied by a unit of time, giving something like watt-hours.
If an 89-watt (average flow) device is left on for 16 hours, it consumes 1.42 kilowatt-hours, which costs about $0.10. If the 200-watt power supply runs full-tilt for 2 minutes while the machine boots up, that's about a penny (rounding up). Meanwhile, if the employee is being paid $6/hour, he's costing a dime a minute, so we've spent $0.20 to save $0.09 on electricity, which I figure is a net loss of $0.11. We need something better than that.
My Dell Dimension 8300 at work has a weekday power-on feature in the firmware, so I can program it to turn on around 5 a.m. It can start up, download its updates, and be ready for me when I get to work. (Then I'll negate the savings by reading /.) But if you're serious about saving energy, your computer's firmware is a good place to look for tools to do it.
Of course, the other thing about TFA is that to get at the Forrester report that is its basis, you'll have to spend $279. That really bites into the payback.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
At my previous job, the corporate boneheads who ran the company from their ivory towers resplendent with golden parachutes decided that we were going to "go green" by turning OFF every computer every night.
Unfortunately, what they did NOT think about (in typical corporate executive fashion) was that the IT department liked to push updates to computers every night. Since all computers had to be turned OFF (as opposed to being in the global-warming producing low-power state), all updates had to run whenever we booted our computers up in the morning.
This meant that it took me 30-45 minutes most day to get my computer to boot up while it installed the various patches that the IT weenies pushed onto my computer the previous night.
I have a bad feeling about this...
This article is moot if you are in a company where for example they may use off cycle time of computers to say render large graphics on the network. The updates issue is also a problem IMO.
Or you could use a cron job and wake on lan to shut them down at night and start them up in the morning without affecting the worker drones at all.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Then there is the issue of starting up for the day. Shutdown can happen automatically, but startup should be initiated by the user. Sometimes it does take several minutes to connect to online volumes or for MS to do whatever it does. I have seen a couple machines take a very long time to boot. Again, I think hibernate is a good compromise, but there must be hooks in the system to allow virus updates and other patches.
All this means that all applications must be closed in case a automatic update occurs, something I almost never do on my machines. I put them to sleep, but my apps are open. On my MS Windows machine, this every once in while means I have to start all over again loading apps.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Have you ever tried? WOL is flaky at its best! When you have a few non-critical machines ..., but when you scale -- Look out!!!
I don't use suspend usually. The main reason being that it kills stateful TCP connections.
ssh is the big one here for me. Things are made a good bit easier by using GNU screen, but I still need to re-establish a bunch of ssh sessions, many of which are dual-factor authenticated.
Another is the inability of people to send me IMs when the system is suspended.
Etc.
All systems take time to start up. Many types of software add to this time, particularly 'enterprise' applications which run as system services or on startup. Users don't like to waste this time. Wasn't there an article about that recently?
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
I would have liked to know how much more the computer uses when it is booting up (or closing down). I might turn the computer off when going for lunch, but with the data presented in the short article, I cannot determine how long you have to be away from the pc to make it worth to shut down the pc. It boots in under 1 minute, so the time I lose by booting is negligible (I have to boot my head as well after lunch, and focus on coffee - that takes at least a minute as well).
Let's do some generous math: $75 per year - and your average computer using employee might cost the company $30,000 per year. Be more generous still and assume that employee has 2000 productive hours per year - that puts the employee's time cost at $15 per hour. So, the energy saved is equivalent to 5 hours of the employee's time - per year. That's 1 minute and 12 seconds per day.
Has anyone here ever experienced a cold-boot time of less than 1 minute and 12 seconds in a "commercial grade" operating system? How about any screen saver / drive sleep schemes that cost less than 72 seconds per day in actual use?
Now, for all your computer users who aren't productive 2000 hours a year and cost more than $15 per hour - these numbers only get worse. Economically, it just doesn't make sense, unless your employee's are hourly and the timeclock is behind the bootup process.
I can see the point the author is trying to make. When your not using your PC, or any electronic device, and it's on your wasting energy. And of course so many devices these days draw power even when they are 'off'. I get it. I have in place methods to really shut down everything when I go out of town for longer than a few days.
And to boot I will power down a PC if I know I'm not going to use it for anything. However I also try to think about what a PC could be doing while I'm away from it. Is it time to defrag the drive? Did I want to download that new Linux ISO while I go watch a movie? Did I want to move a DIVX to VCD format? Etc.
And of course on cold nights I'll look for any excuse to leave the PC in my room on for a bit of extra warmth.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I have never had a PC or a Laptop which was able to reliably "Suspend" or "UnSuspend" Never in my life.
Not with Windows or several Linux Distros. I would say at least 25% of the time the machine will not return and must be rebooted anyway.
If everyone turned off their PC at night, all the spambots running on their machines wouldn't be filling my inbox with crap. :)
From my experience with some corporations, the way it works is more like:
1. The left hand doesn't know, and doesn't want to know what the right is doing. If your department can save $10 bucks, but it costs everyone else 10 million in workarounds and lost productivity, who cares? You're the greatest anyway.
2. Any attempts to rein in waste and such effects, just introduces one more layer who'll get their bonus for making you buy a tool that costs $10 less, but where you spend 100,000 more in salaries to do the same job. Occasionally it introduces a masked form of corruption too: they get more bonus for buying a $1000 pencil at 50% discount, than a normal one at 5% discount. In the former case they "saved" $500 per pencil. They're that great.
3. Don't underestimate interdepartment power games. Making you curse and waste more effort for implementing my hare-brained cost-cutting schemes, is the gretest achievement some people can get. It's me having power over you. For some people it's a powerful drug.
4. Theatre. Being seen as doing something beats doing the right thing. You can see that at all levels and in all domains: security theatre, cost-saving theatre, etc. Being seen as being teh great green saviour can beat actually saving money.
5. In that vein, beware the new boss who just has to piss on everything to mark his new territory. The higher level, the more dangerous. These guys _have_ to show that they changed something. It shows vision, leadership, etc. So he'll cheerfully make an actual loss, just so he can put a good leadership and vision theatre.
6. There's a whole caste of people across the pyramid whose goal in life is to not rock the boat and not be responsible for anything. It's better to comply with a dumb rule (even one that wasn't supposed to apply to your situation or domain) than to have anything be your personal decision, and responsibility if it fails. Applying someone else's rule is like having a papal indulgence: whatever goes wrong, you're not the one who'll be punished for it. These fine guys and gals would mindlessly enforce even turning off the computers _during_ work hours, if that's what the rules say.
7. Don't underestimate the effect of rewarding failure. E.g., see the thing about "saving" money by buying a disproportionately _more_ expensive thing. E.g., in some places, keeping the people under you from doing their job can mean needing to hire more people, and if you get enough of them you get a promotion. E.g., being the guy who dumbly applies rules without thinking, cam actually get one a promotion or at the very least it's often enough to not get demoted or phased out.
So, yes, I've seen places where they paid consultants in the range of thousands per hour, but would rather pay those to twiddle their thumbs for a quarter of an hour while a baroque configuration starts, than "waste" cents on leaving that computer idle over night.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I keep wanting to just ignore such errors, calling the writer an idiot, but often the random units cause the science to be indecipherable. In this case you can figure out what they are getting at.
Any modern PC can S3 suspend.
S3 suspend cuts power use by 95% and the PC resumes *INSTANTLY*.
I can S3 suspend my laptop and have it run off the battery for over a week - open it up and I am back where I left off in about 2-3 seconds.
There is no argument against having an IT policy MANDATING S3 suspend. Hell you can even automate it to do it by default every day at 6 PM unless the PC is in use (easily checked by screensaver APIs).
I still have issues suspending/waking computers. Generally it works fine... But sometimes you run into odd issues.
One client we support has a piece of software that hates waking from suspend. Pitches a huge fit. All sorts of errors.
And I still have problems with some computers/OSes that really should handle S3 just fine simply choking on it. Won't resume reliably or whatever.
The real problem I have with power saving options is rolling out the settings consistently across multiple computers. Last time I checked (and it has been a little while since I checked, so I could be wrong) there was no way to push out power settings with a GPO. Sure, you can set screensaver options... Turn off the monitor or something... But that doesn't get you a suspended computer. You can set options on the individual computer, in their motherboard settings... But that isn't easy to update/change across a network. You can throw together a pile of scripts to shut down machines...maybe try to use wake-on-LAN to power them back up in the morning...
I'm not saying it can't be done. And I'm not going to say that you can't save any power by doing it. But there doesn't seem to be a simple way of managing these settings across a network yet. It still seems that power management is a hacked-together feature that was tacked on after the fact.
I'd love to be able to push out a group policy that made all the computers on my network suspend after an hour idle.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I was so confused by your post's title. I kept waiting for the part where you explained why you wanted to file a lawsuit against a state of computer sleep.
I have: my EeePC suspends and wakes up without any problems (with the original Linux-distribution). It's quick, too.
Oh wait...
My team has some 1U servers in the lab which is assigned to the Devs and Tests. And there are several "turn off" points that keep us from turning them off:
1. The servers sit in another LAN segment, WOL does not work without some work
2. That's just too expensive to buy out-of-band management card...We don't really need those.
3. Most importantly, the server takes 20 seconds to go from blank screen to signal, then 1+ minutes to finish the BIOS POST, RAID discovery! Hell...when desktop only takes 3 seconds (50+ times faster), couldn't they optimize that for the server though?!
Not to mention the FAN speed cannot be tuned, while on Desktop FAN speed auto-throttle is a popular features included in major mainboard.
It's those manufacturers to make us go green harder.
The Forrester report "How Much Monday are Your Idle PCs Wasting?" is available for $279.
Presumably an auto-correct became an auto-screwup.
Try a Mac. One of the things that initially impressed me most about my old iBook G4 was that sleep actually worked. (I have a Thinkpad X60 tablet now and while sleep mostly works, I never know whether it's going to suspend to RAM or to disk.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It makes perfect sense. I just read it to mean that power usage increases every hour by 89 watts, and that by the time it's been left on overnight for 16 hours, the power usage of an average desktop has increased to 1.42kW. (If you think I'm joking, do the math -- that can't be a coincidence ;-))
This kind of growth of power usage means it is extremely important to turn off your PC every night, otherwise by a month later the power consumption will be approximately 64kW, which will probably result in it melting through your desktop unless you have very good cooling.
Not only that, but "watts per hour" doesn't actually make any sense at all. Unless we're talking about something that is gradually consuming more and more power as time passes.
Modern computers are designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles before failure,
and then...
[ Powering up and down PCs is OK -- but find out why powering down servers is a calculated risk. ]
and in the linked article, by the same author:
...machines can handle being shut down a finite number of times. Arguably, the number is large enough for regular power cycling over an extended period of time. "Most server vendors today say they'll support a certain number of cycles of powering things on and off," Monroe said. "I believe most of the server vendors would say [the number] is in the hundreds as opposed to the thousands."
So which is it? This guy should be fired and this publication should be completely ignored. Do they even have editors there to read these things before they're published?
Save PC power, save the world.
I would always leave my bedroom PC on in case I needed to FTP into it and get some data when I was away from home. Since then, though, I've learned that it's easy to power up my PC from anywhere in the world. Then I VNC into it, do stuff and shut it down.
It really feels like I'm living in the future! Actually, my computer is set to auto-hibernate when there's no activity for a while, and WOL can wake it from this as well. These days I also wake my computer from work before I go home, and set it to download the previous night's Colbert torrent, so that it's ready when I get home. Now I need some sort of a USB-switchable power strip so that I could control the power of my other appliances, like lights and audio system.
>Any modern PC can S3 suspend.
But mine's running Ubuntu, you insensitive clod!
I totally agree, S3 suspend really hasn't matured to the point where it can be used without repercussions. Lots of software tend to crash when waking up from S3 suspend, or even S2 standby. Especially those god awful wireless network card drivers. And once they go down, your network card simply wont be active without a restart due to sudden jump in time. Too many things can go wrong on HAL. Even when using linux. Also, some hardware simply need the bios to re-initialize them, OS just wont do the trick and they stay at S3 even though the rest of the computer is back to active mode. I think we should make the "green" features functional before preaching about using them.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
"(1.8 kW is correct.)"
Except that 120V*20A = 2400VA, = +/-2.4kW, and a 20 amp circuit can draw more than 20 amps for a short time. (I don't think that you're allowed to plan on connecting a full 20 amps to a 20amp circuit when laying out a circuit design, though)
Meh, the 3 dozen IBM desktops/laptops I administer, both my laptops and all 3 home built systems(2003 server, and vista or linux duel booting OpenSuse and Kubuntu respectively) all suspend just fine.
I can't remember owning a computer in the last 10 years that didn't have a "Power on at X:XX O'Clock" setting in the BIOS.
Today, users log on and off anyway. How hard would it be to set computers to turn themselves on at 8:20am Mon-Fri. People get to work and it's all ready and waiting for them to login!
This kind of growth of power usage means it is extremely important to turn off your PC every night, otherwise by a month later the power consumption will be approximately 64kW
64kW should be enough for anybody.
If your system is suspended, you are most likely not at your desk, so what is the benefit of receiving an IM? IM isn't a replacement for e-mail.
Seconded. I have a G3 iBook, a G5 iMac, and an Intel MacBook that suspend and restore within 1 second (with automatic hibernate if the battery dies while suspended). Not only that, but wireless generally connects and is ready to use within 1-3 seconds as well. I think I may have remotted each maybe 5 times throughout their respective lifespans, and then only for updates. I've used Dell, HP, Gateway, and Sony machines with mixes of Linux and Windows and none of them can do this reliably. It's really disappointing that other vendors can't seem to get this right.
The linked article is nothing more than a poorly disguised plug for an expensive Forrestor research paper.
Right now when I get a support call in the middle of the night, I can bounce out of bed and remote desktop into my office pc to handle the issue immediately. How am I supposed to RDC into a down machine? So instead I will have to get dressed, take a cab to the office, get past security in the middle of the night, and finally boot up the machine. That takes an hour of time, plus the cab ride isn't exactly carbon friendly (I'd need a taxi ride because adequate public transportation isn't available in the middle of the night). Having this situation arise just 2-3 times a year would wipe out any savings from leaving the machine off, and that's not counting the cost of my time and the fact that clients will be upset that an issue that should have taken less than 5 minutes to resolve took over an hour.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
LOL @ link @ bottom of article
When I have something that I need to run for a longer period of time (long download, etc) I just run it on one of my low-power boxes. Running a via C7, they're always on, and they use a *max* of 45-60W power (that's as much as the brick can supply) for everything including the drives, etc. Generally, they use a lot less than that (significiantly less than a lightbulb)
Now I've seen that modern PC's can go into advanced sleep modes to conserve power, and that a lot of CPU's can throttle to save a certain amount of juice as well (anyone have a page with stats on the power-usage for different ratios), but is there an intermediary step? How about having a secondary CPU/core which low power-consumption, but enough to run basic tasks such as downloading stuff, etc.
When your computer isn't being actively used, allow the user to switch to "low profile" mode where the main CPU, GPU, various peripherals, (user-selectable) etc power down and then re-activate when they're actually needed by the user.
Seriously, having a 2GHZ*quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM and a kickass graphics card is great, but there's not much call for it in the off-hours when you only need the equivalent of a P3-900Mhz or less for your downloads.
My Laptop uses about 15-60 Watts (25-30 Watts idle) and my external Display uses 30-60 Watts. So, if I turn off my display, I save 40-70 percent of the energy and I can still "resume" in 3 seconds and run background stuff at night. Even though it should go to sleep automatically.
So, I was working for $FEDERALBUREAU, it was in the summer and California was having another of its interminable energy crises.
I'm on a conference call, and the conversation goes something like this:
Executive Boss-Woman: "So, until Christmas we'll be turning off all of the microcomputers at night."
Me: "Um... why? We do all of our necessary updates during off hours."
EBW: "Well, to save power, help out those fool Californians."
Me: "Um... it's pointless. There's a reason they have those rolling blackouts at four in the afternoon and not four in the morning."
EBW: "Well, we're not taking siestas at four in the afternoon!"
Me: "Precisely. Let's just pretend you never brought this up."
The practical upshot, of course: we did all the updates during the day, the users were all torqued at the 20-minute logins, and the EBW eventually found gainful employment somewhere else.
Because that's the way many of the people I communicate with communicate. Metcalf's Law and all, you know?
One thing I never see in any of these power-saving articles, even a recent one on how to save energy cooking your Thanksgiving turkey, is how the waste heat ties in to your HVAC system.
It makes a huge difference to your math depending on whether you need air conditioning, heating, or can passively cool with simple ventilation.
So, let's assume you're in an environment like mine (Toronto, Canada); 6 to 8 months of the year you need at least some domestic heat. (The radiators are usually started in October and shut down in April at my office.)
If you need to ADD HEAT to an office or house, then every Watt you save in electricity, you have to replace some other way. Now, given typical technologies, like an 80% AFUE furnace, it's about 30% cheaper to do that with the furnace, sure. But that means that $75/year savings is actually only 30% of that amount (because the furnace has to run more often). Or it's ZERO if you use resistive electric heat! (Currently oil heat is slightly more expensive to run than city gas here, but not as expensive as resistive electric.)
You can't just shut everything down over night and let the building cool off completely. It must be at least... well, it's 68 degF for residential, so let's assume commercial office space has to be similar. You could have a set-back thermostat let the temperature drop a bit, and then boost it back to normal before the workers get in, sure. And maybe, in a very well-insulated building, it would still be worthwhile turning off some of the machines.
If you need to COOL an office of house, it goes the other way. Using an EER 13 air conditioner as a reference, I worked out that 100 Watts of heat require an additional 42 Watts of cooling power to remove that heat from the air. So, in that case, your $75 GROWS by 42%. (And if you're in a warmer climate, it will grow by even more, as the same air conditioning plant will work less efficiently.)
But it's not that simple, either. We're talking about PCs left on overnight, yes? Well, the cooler it is outside, the more efficient an air conditioner works. So, actually, it costs more to remove the heat generated by the PCs DURING THE DAY, and much less over night. Especially if your system can switch to pure ventilation when the outside temperature drops below the inside thermostat set-points. (Whether or not that can happen depends on locale; in Toronto, it's only a couple or three weeks of the year where it's warmer at night than you want inside.)
About the only time these articles calculations make sense is, when you can just open the windows and have the interior space at the right temperature.
Unit errors are generally a sign in technical fields that a report hasn't been well thought out. No engineer proofreading this would have missed such a blatant error which means that an engineer didn't proofread it.
If an engineer did not proofread it, an engineer did not likely do it. Therefore, the content of the article was likely done by an incompetent hack and charging $279 for the report is a way of hiding the fact that it was written by a hack.
My wife's Macbook is the only computer that I've ever seen suspend correctly.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
How about 'they got it backward and just made a typo'?
With this phenomenal number of geeks I don't understand why no one (other than the less than stellar article) has mentioned WOL. Or BIOS wake. Get the computer to boot an hour before the user shows up. There have been a few arguments about other programs which must be loaded after the user logs in, but most are bitching about boot time. Fuck guys, part of the solution, not the problem, eh?
Great Scott! Wait til the PC hits 88mph, then you're going to see some serious shit!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Resuming from suspend for me takes anywhere between 5-10s. It's not instant, but compared to a cold boot, close enough.
I still have a newish (790i) motherboard that sometimes will not come out of suspend and must be powered down. Given that it still does not seem 100% reliable, I still prefer the safety of shutting down; once bitten and all that.
I've got Vista 64bit on my main home computer, and it works great. And XP on my wife's old laptop does it well too. Never got it to work well with Kubuntu, but that's running on an older machine so probably a hardware thing.
I assembled a computer for someone using a late model ASUS motherboard and it too will wake up a few seconds after I set it to Hybrid Sleep (S3) in Vista.
The solution for me was to go to the mouse's Hardware Properties and under the Power Management Tab, deselect the "Allow this device to wake up the computer". After changing that option, the computer now sleeps when told to do so. The only downside is you cannot wake it up from Hybrid Sleep by moving the mouse. You have to press the power button on the PC.
What IM are you using? MSN and Yahoo support offline messages.
Any big IT department is also pushing out patches at night when the computer is on.
Three words for you: Wake On LAN
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
260 work days per year
5 minutes of employee time wasted per day
1300 minutes wasted per year, or 21.6 hours!
Even if you take a minimum wage employee at $6.55 per hour, that's a cost of $141.92 (larger for higher paid employees) per employee for powering off the PC. Sure seems to me a smarter investment to leave it on!
suspend+ networked files typically means corrupt files. That kills most corp environments for using this.
That's why you use WoL to boot the system one hour before employees arrive, do a virus scan, check for updates, or other maintenance tasks.
1 hour is generally enough time for updates and virus scan. Employees come into a machine ready to go, you get regular maintenance and everybody's happy.
Sigh. I wish 1 hour was enough for my work PC. Much as I don't like it, I have been leaving mine on overnight as our virus scan (scheduled for the wee hours of the morning) can take several hours to complete... and I'm one of the luckier ones!
Yeah, you can figure out what they are getting at. But do you trust those figures to be correct when they clearly have no idea what watts and watt-hours actually are?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
It's really disappointing that other vendors can't seem to get this right.
Indeed. Especially considering that this feature has been around for EVER. My father's first powerbook was a 520, bought in 1994, which had the same sleep capabilities as todays macs, and I believe it has been around longer then that (possibly already with the original Mac Portable).
Unit errors are generally a sign in technical fields that a report hasn't been well thought out. No engineer proofreading this would have missed such a blatant error which means that an engineer didn't proofread it.
If an engineer did not proofread it, an engineer did not likely do it. Therefore, the content of the article was likely done by an incompetent hack and charging $279 for the report is a way of hiding the fact that it was written by a hack.
Unit errors aside, is the point valid, or does a PC really consume more power starting up than it would running overnight?
to solve the problem, I am going to pay the hack who wrote the article $279/hour for it! Since I figured it took 10s to make it up, that's 70c
Almost true. Mostly true? Or used to be true. Or, in a perfect utopia, this isn't true anymore.
There's a tool from Energystar called EZ GPO which lets you install an power managment agent on the client, and manage it using an administrative template. In my experience, it works pretty well. It's a bit weird though: for some configurations, the tool doesn't use the win API, and has broken in the past with Windows Updates.
AFAIK, Windows 2008, or a Vista workstation on a 2k3 domain can be used to manage power savings on XP if the client-side extensions are installed.
Also, some expensive tools like LANDesk support power policies. Not ideal for most people ($$$$), but if you're already using "enterprise" management tools, worth checking out.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
" "Modern computers are designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles before failure, and you're not likely to approach that number during the average computer's five to seven year life span."
Too bad all major HD manufactures claim 10,000 power cycles, and many power saving settings will turn off a HD w/o doing anything else. Which means you may have many more than 1 HD power cycle per computer power cycle.
"some studies indicate it would require on/off cycling every five minutes to harm the hard drive."
over how much time, because if you did this continuously, you would kill a harddrive in less than 35 days since you would have eat'n all 10,000 average power cycles.
So..take all the money you would save...and spend it on this ridiculous 'report' The Forrester report "How Much Monday are Your Idle PCs Wasting?" is available for $279 how much Monday ? -- http://nigelt.blog.com/
nigelt.wordpress.com
My Macs (Mini and MacBook Pro) sleep beautifully. Strangely enough, my old Dell laptop running Windows XP hibernates beautifully. It's the only machine I've ever owned or even heard of that could hibernate and return without messing up, and as far as I know the only machine set to hibernate anywhere on the planet.
I can't get my home Linux server to even sleep correctly.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
That's funny because my roommates Macbook while it does come out of suspend often doesn't have working wifi afterwards resulting in her needing to reboot to hop back online.
I've found newer harder doesn't sleep properly, four years ago I had a reliable Dell lattitude that would suspend and wake up without any problems hopping back on wifi networks without any issue. For whatever reason it seems newer hardware has other priorities or there is a general decline in driver stability lately.
This article ignores how commercial facilities are charged by power companies. Commercial facilities are not priced the same way residential power consumption is priced. Ever wonder why all the sky scrapers downtown have their lights on all night? It's because it's cheaper to leave them on than save power and turn them off. Power companies charge commercial facilities based on how much "surge" (I might have the technical term wrong here) they produce. Meaning, if everyone comes into work in the morning and turns their lights and computers on, that produces a large "surge". If everyone leaves the lights and computers on all night, that produces less "surge" and therefore a smaller power bill.
So if you turn off the PC and then the next day when Lucy the Secretary comes into work and there's something wrong, it's your fault and she's the assistant to the senior vp of dicking around so it's too damn important for her to be w/o her PC for 5 seconds and you should get fired you nerd geek asshole.
Better that companies waste money than spend all their time and effort looking for someone to hang.
Many people think that kWh is "kiloWatt PER hour", and confuse watts for energy and watts-times-hour as power. It looks to them as a division rather than a multiplication. They wouldn't distinguish kWh from kW/h. This guy is, therefore, three out of four times right :-)
I'm glad I'm not the only who noticed this. Their blatant misuse of units is irritating and shows their lack of knowledge. But they are right in saying a computer booting up doesn't use 16 hours worth of power. I work in a cube farm and most people don't turn their computers off at night, some people even leave CPU intensive screen savers on without any monitor power down feature, so their CPU is thrashing all night long and their monitor is showing everything for nobody to see.
watts per hour?
Is the power usage accelerating?
Glad others noticed this. When the first item is so blatantly non-scientific, the entire summary(and therefore the report) can accurately be dismissed as junk. Unfortunately, they're not marketing this to smart people, they're marketing to PHBs.
Another is the inability of people to send me IMs when the system is suspended.
The SSH I'll buy, but Instant Messages? Really? Isn't that kind of what email is designed for, so people can send you messages you'll get when you get back to your computer?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
People should just buy the best CPU for the job they try to accomplish instead of buying the power hungry CPUs if they don't need them.
Because a PC is meant to multi-purpose. Sometimes you need a power-hungry CPU, and sometimes you don't. Most people don't have so many computers around (as an IT person I do, and even I find it gets cluttered and annoying at times), so having machines of multiple power would be less convenient than having a machine that scales better to the task(s) at hand.
Not only is it obviously not a typo, but the hysterics the author attempts to incite are rather laughable.
"Power surge"?
"The average US wall outlet (can only provide) about one-tenth of what the power surge would require"?
What on Earth is this guy babbling about? Does he (or the "researcher") think that all the power the PC requires to run all night must be transmitted at once?
Does anybody know of similar, but with correctly stated units, details regarding monitors' use? I know flat panels are better over all, but there'd still be a difference. I know from working on TVs that most of the power still gets used as long as the CRT is on, no matter what's shown or not. The guns have to be ready to project an image should one occur -- the CRT can't guess how long nothing will be presented. I once heard figures for 'instant on' TVs when they were new that claimed 25% to 75% savings, depending on the manufacturer (despite similar technologies, so the figures go well with salt).
I do recall that screen savers saved nothing (per the author of the old Mac flying toaster screensaver, quoted in Forbes) in terms of power, and that with the advent of SVGA that unless a monitor stayed on constantly and showed the same screen most of the time, then they didn't even save screens from burn in.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Sucks to be you. My mac laptop does this perfectly and has done for years.
Shucks, even back in '89, I had a Sperry Unix system that it worked beautifully on. I came in to work to discover to my horror the computer was off. Seems my boss unplugged it as a lesson to me to turn if off. On reboot, the screen came up and said it had detected a power loss and was restoring the system. Then I was right back into the same vi session i had left, with nothing missing. I subsequent test of typing and pulling the cord only result of losing 3 characters.
Maybe you should quit using crap OS's.
Aren't most IM systems these days smart enough to tell you "The person you were trying to reach isn't at the computer right now, but will see your message as soon as he/she returns?"
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Maybe they're channeling Jeff Foxworthy. A recent contestant on his program "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?" was asked "How many watts are there in a kilowatt-hour?" I don't remember any other time when I really wished I was on TV...
rj
$75 dollars per year? that is pathetic.
If it takes an employee 1 minute to power off (including properly shutting down all apps and saving shit), and 4 minutes to power up and launch all those apps again.
That's at least 16 hours a year. Best case scenario that employee costs $20/hour so that's $320/year...
Most of the time employees cost more like $40/hour all in.
So the moral of the story is keep your PCs running all year to save lots of money.
Wait, were they supposed to be debunking or spreading myths?
The myth he's debunking is that it takes so much power to turn on the computer (which would happen all at once in a "surge") that it eliminates the power benefit of leaving it off overnight. So what he's babbling about is calculating the amount of energy a computer uses as it's left idle overnight, the length of time such a computer might take to boot up, compressing that energy use into the boot-up time window, and comparing it to the capacity of a power outlet. Despite the incorrect units, the conclusion is that a normal outlet couldn't possibly supply that much energy in such a short time.
This blog points out that "Enabling this device to wake the PC" for a keyboard or mouse can have a 50+ watt effect on how much energy you save during sleep mode.
http://techpoet.blogspot.com/2008/11/power-consumption-of-my-windows-desktop.html
I've traditionally left my machines running, to avoid thermal stress from power-cycling and mechanical wear on parts from spinning up from a dead stop. I've found the big savings comes from two things:
If I need more power savings, I might spin down the hard drives. But modern drives don't use that much power just to keep the platters spinning, most of their power consumption's driving the heads. Simply retracting the heads and not moving them lowers the drive's power consumption by a fairly big percentage, and that'll happen automatically when the system isn't accessing the disk. None of this requires any fancy sleep or hibernate or suspend magic.
I have noticed one thing, though. My Linux systems go idle fairly cleanly. Nothing's happening, minimal CPU time gets used (mainly the regular cron process waking up to check whether there's anything to run, then going back to sleep) and the hard drive stays completely idle. Windows, OTOH, keeps pinging the hard drive every 5 seconds or so even when completely idle. It's not much, just enough to make the HDD light flicker, but I don't see that with Linux. It makes me wonder how much of the "You need to put your system to sleep!" hype is simply because Windows doesn't know how to idle properly?
What I'd really like to see is power settings based on the time of day...
7:55a - wake the PC up, I'm coming into the office
8a-5p - High performance mode. Display off after 30min. Suspend/Hibernate - never
5p - Power savings mode. Display off after 10min, Suspend/Hibernate - 30min.
3a - wake up for downloading updates, virus scan, backup
4a - back to power savings mode.
XP and Vista don't have this. Not sure about Linux, OSX.
Are there any utility apps that can do this?
Can this be done via network admin?
Okay, I follow what you're saying. Even though it is never an objection I've heard to powering-down a PC, and frankly makes even less sense than the outlet-melting power surge nonsense. I was interpreting the whole thing as being compound ignorance leading the author on a fantastic trip of wild delusions.
Try a Mac. One of the things that initially impressed me most about my old iBook G4 was that sleep actually worked.
My macbook mostly wakes up fine from being suspended, and I've generally been very happy with it. Occasionally, however, it gets confused about whether the lid is open or not. Sometimes I can recover by waiting, sometimes by closing the lid and waiting, and other times it just doesn't want to come back and requires a reboot holding down the power button.
Because the screen stays black when it is "confused", the only two indications I have that something is happening are the white LED and the CD drive making noises. The LED is supposed to be solid when the system is on (lid open), and fading in/out when sleeping (lid closed) - but it occasionally appears to be reversed.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
Meh, the 3 dozen IBM desktops/laptops I administer, ... all suspend just fine.
But do they UNsuspend?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sorry for the rant, but I'm tired of people using today's electricity costs as if the cost covered *everything*.
Remember, today's electricity prices rarely cover the damage we're doing to the environment. Let's talk garbage collection for a moment. If you didn't pay someone to take your trash away, it would be cheaper to live. However, the trash would just pile up everywhere. At some point, all of that garbage would create physical risks and health hazards. Think how happy the rats and other vermin would be, eating the buffet in your backyard. Suddenly, maybe after a plague or two, we realize we need to clean up the garbage. That's going to come with a big price tag. (Remember to include the loss of health/life in addition to the monetary cost.)
Getting back to electricity, there seems to be pretty good evidence we're messing up the environment in a big way. We've been doing this for 50+ years. Humanity has such a "whatever" attitude about it that it will take something big for us to finally say, "Oh crap!" What will that be? The loss of a country due to rising ocean levels? How much more junk will we have put in the air/ground by the time that happens?
Considering how long it's going to take to realize we actually do need to fix it, how long is it going to take to clean up? What will the price tag be? Who's going to foot the bill?
I can answer the last one for you. Us. Not the CEOs who say global warming is a crock of crap and fight it tooth and nail because it's supposedly bad for business. They are who we'll be paying.
I have never had a PC or a Laptop which was able to reliably "Suspend" or "UnSuspend" Never in my life.
And I have. Two, in fact.
But thanks anyway for your anecdote.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Usually when that sort of thing happens to me it's because I closed the lid (causing it to start going to sleep) and then opened it again before it finished (causing it to still be in the "sleep" state with the lid open). Closing and opening the lid again tends to fix it for me.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Get a mac then. My ibook doesn't ever get turned off. I shut the lid and its asleep, I open the lid and 2 seconds later its connected to wifi and firefox is open again. My new Ubuntu desktop also suspends nicely, takes 5 seconds to turn on and all apps are running. Only thing is I need to reset the wireless connection (ifdown ifup). So ... try again!
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
There are at least 2, my HP Vista laptop both sleeps and hibernates just fine. The desktop is not so skilled at it though.
The fact that macs cost twice as much for equivalent PC hardware negates any and all savings you would get from power saving. Unless you live inside the reality distortion field, that is.
Fedora 9 and an Alienware MX-15 laptop. To my surprise Suspend worked without any extra configuration. Though I had a problem with the sound coming back, but that was fixed with unloading/reloading the relative sound modules when resuming. For my wireless NIC I am not using the NetworkManager, just the old school network daemon so setting it up to stop and start the network on resume takes care of that. Close the lid on the laptop, it suspends and open the lid it resumes. Now my desktop system, I've never gotten that one to work at all with various distros...
Saves energy, AND helps the economy! Because turning off/on all the time shortens component life, making you have to buy replacements sooner! w00t
Aye, I've noticed that I can sometimes reproduce similar behavior by doing just that. It also sometimes happens if I unplug a USB device after closing the lid. Othertimes, it just happens without any apparent precipitating action from me. It isn't very often.
Beyond that, like someone else mentioned, I rarely have to wait very long (esp on my home WLAN, others are slower), if at all, for the wireless link to come up.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
You are assuming my computer isn't doing anything at night...
My computer is busy 24/7...the monitor does go to sleep though....
WTF does that have to do with anything? It's a laptop, dumbass; you need sleep to work just so that you can put it away and take it back out again quickly when you're out somewhere.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Unit errors aside, is the point valid, or does a PC really consume more power starting up than it would running overnight?
No, but I've never head anybody claim that it does. I've heard lots of people claim it's cheaper to leave computers on overnight, but because the computers (supposedly) last longer, rather than using less power.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Seconded. I have a G3 iBook, a G5 iMac, and an Intel MacBook that suspend and restore within 1 second (with automatic hibernate if the battery dies while suspended).
It may suspend in a second, but it's still writing that hibernate information for the next minute or two. I recently did a stint at a data recovery company. The number of drives with scratched platters we had in from MacBooks which had been closed then casually chucked in a bag was remarkable. That used to be fine, that's how I treated my old iBook, but now they hibernate as well you have to be gentle with them for a minute or two after they've been closed.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I second that. I switched a year ago, and sleep works great. What a surprise, after years of really crappy experiences with Windows laptops. Can't tell you how many demonstrations were delayed by having to reboot. Not anymore.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
If it's the heating season, and you heat with electricity as many do. You likely save nothing by turning your computers off. Unless you store heat with off-peak, or run a heat pump, or similar.
Of coarse then it becomes more important to turn them off in the cooling season as you should include the additional power to keep the space cool in your cost calculation.
That's why GP said "sue S3 suspend".
You have to consider side benefits as well...
What would be the positive impact on the environment be if every PC in the US was left on only half the time that it is now?
What would be the drop in energy price associated with the decreased demand (and therefore increase in supply surplus)?
What would be the reduction in wear and tear on Power equipment or rolling brown-outs due to not being able to match supply?
If we're ever going to do any good for the environment, we need to stop only looking at the direct dollar amounts. We need to consider the environmental impact and related benefits -- both of which stand to have a positive showing on the bottom line, as well as being something that we can feel good about, and which *has* to be done for future generations.
Most credible people agree that we need to make changes, so why the hell are we procrastinating... If we keep waiting for the perfect solution, a whole lot of better solutions are going to get passed over... and frankly, we can't commercialize those "perfect solutions" without proving that the "better solutions" are viable in the market -- that's capitalism.
I'm no hippy, but damn people -- Wake up!
Have you not used a new computer within the last decade or so? I suspend my PCs all the time, and while I can't say they've been completely without problems, the rate at which I need to reboot the machine because it won't come back properly is less than 1%.
PC Power debunks you!
I don't know if power management options are included in the windows group policies (it's been a long time since I took my MCSA class, and they didn't cover power options at all), but Windows lets you set a standby/hibernate/shutdown after XX minutes of idle, in the same menu that lets you set hard drive spindown and monitor standby.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
I'm going to assume you don't really hang around too many younger people... I have a lot of younger friends, and you'd be surprised how few of them actually use e-mail to any meaningful extent.
These days among the younger crowd, messages are all exchanged via SMS, Facebook, IM, and the like. Heck, I think IM services are even falling out of usage in terms of SMS.
More like, "How much revenue are your intrusive ads creating when your story gets published on Slashdot?" Amirite?
Sucks to be you. I have an Dell laptop (one of the Ubuntu models) and the suspend (and hibernate) features work perfectly every time.
I can also apparently type more than that for my comment, so here is some extra garbage to take up some space. Slashdot, can you please stop with this lame hand-holding bullshit?
You should really pick your hardware better. All of my boxes (1 XP, 1 XP x64, 2 Vista X62, a Ubuntu workstation, and Mac Book Pro)ALL S3 suspend perfectly and resume almost immediately (and perfectly).
Why? Distance is the independent variable, not the dependent one. You might want to know how many gallons you'll use on a 200 mile trip, but it's unlikely you want to know how far a trip you can go on with the 8 gallons left in your tank.
I take it you've not driven much in the desert, say US 50 from Fallon to Ely (Nevada). Knowing if you have enough fuel to make it to the next gas pump is no laughing matter when it's more than 100 miles away and over 100 degrees in the shade (or would be, if there was any).
Wow $279.00 for a report written by someone that can't do math. What does any one expect form Forrester. Marketing whores. Don't you love them.
A little quote for those at Forrester. "It is best to remain silent and hever people think you are a fool and to open your mouth snd remove all doubt.
I have a Thinkpad X60 tablet now and while sleep mostly works, I never know whether it's going to suspend to RAM or to disk.
Macs do the same thing though, including randomly waking up while suspended to RAM to write everything to disk.
Is that something like acceleration?
Macs do it on purpose though, when the battery is about to run out. (At least newer ones with "safe sleep," anyway -- my G4 would just run down the battery and lose my data if I didn't plug it in within about a week.) In contrast, my Thinkpad does it unpredictably even when the battery is full.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
As long as you have access to one Vista or Server2008 machine to admin Group Policy with, the new(ish) group policy extensions (both vista and xp) give much better Power Savings options. (And a ton more things that should have been in there to begin with.)
If not, the EPA has a utility/combination GPO template and assorted reg-entries available.
I previous did an analysis at an engineering firm, and agree with the $75/year savings on power, however their systems had no scheduled wakeup, plus some engineers worked wierd hours. Because of this, if machines were shut down at night it would take about 4 minutes per day to boot the machines (and no one presses the power button BEFORE going for their coffee...) that totals up to 20 min/week, or approx 1.5 hours/month per employee 18 hours /year @ $25+/hour doesn't come close of making a $75 saving worthwhile. Standby doesn't completely cut power consumption, but it is the optimum savings for both time and energy.