Hate to reply to my own post, but I wanted to clarify my point.
Because the process will use 100% of a CPU core for a unit of time, a higher powered CPU will expend more energy than a lower powered CPU as they will both be active for the same amount of time, but the higher powered CPU is designed to consumer more power per unit of time. If the process was limited by a complex calculation, then the higher powered CPU would finish faster and spend more time in a sleep state, which would likely use less power overall.
This is obviously poor programming to be using so many CPU cycles while simply waiting, but there is little that can be done about a Microsoft process.
What seems to be happening is that Windows 7 detects high CPU usage, so sets the CPU in turbo mode, consuming much more power. Because Vista and 7 will have the process consume all of the CPU for an identical amount of time, the 7 system ends up using more power. The solution would be to fix the process that consume CPU cycles while waiting, which should result in a much more responsive and power saving system under Windows 7 than Vista.
The update process uses 100% of a CPU core while it is waiting on some thread to finish. If the pending thread finishes quickly, then little CPU is used. Or the pending thread can take forever or lock up, and you end up using a significant amount of CPU and energy.
Would you provide links to solar panel projects that are net energy positive (have provided more energy than they took to produce and install). Heck, link to projects that are at least half way to paying off their real (un-subsidized) price.
There are good solar projects out there, but solar panels are far from efficient. Solar panels are a great way to get electricity in remote locations. For supplementing grid power, they are poor at best.
I think (hope) that some day this will change, but we are not there yet. And at the current speed, we won't be there for decades.
The dollar per watt on nuclear power is significantly lower, and also increases energy security. Also, when the solar systems stop working correctly in a year due to bad wiring, they will be worthless. There are solar panel systems all over the place that aren't hooked up due to them breaking and no one wanting to spend the money to fix them (one of the big problems with lots of small scale energy projects).
I don't know about this particular program, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were federal funds involved. If there are federal funds involved, all tax payers are paying for the systems.
1. You are still paying a lot of money so that one person has their utility bill drop to almost nothing (and no, almost all funds for this come from taxes). And your bill will never drop an appreciable amount.
2. Scales of efficiency. You spend a lot more dollars per watt to install a dinky solar panel on one person's house than you do building a solar plant. They only make sense as a personal investment, but solar panels are still a terrible investment due to production costs.
I know that Microsoft for some time has been trying to push their own PDF replacement (XPS). However, I've never been able to get XPS files to work properly. And I've never met anyone that's been able to get them to work properly. (Sometimes creation fails with an error or you have a file that is too small to be valid, or nothing will open them up or have them look even vaguely correct.)
I'm thinking a replicator won't make you a bigger house, or fix your current one. There is more to poverty than just having enough food. Although I suppose you could simply replicate a million large legos and build the house of your dreams? Vertically?
Still, if food, energy, and materials are essentially free for all to use, just how does an economy work?
I can't find anywhere in the study that describes a speed difference, other than the impact of actually fixing the errors. Do you have a link to a study that describes the performance impact that doesn't require a subscription?
I'm confused why we're still using asphalt shingles in the first place. Wouldn't it be easier/faster/better/cheaper to do something else?
For example, one of these: 1. Spray a water proof coating onto the wood roof. 2. Stick a water proof sheet to the wood roof. 3. Cover the roof with galvanized steel or hard plastic.
I will never understand people's fetish with covering their houses with at asphalt shingles instead of almost anything else. When considering energy costs during summer, dark shingles made of tar seems like a poor choice.
I just want to add that while they are legally made, and cheaper, they tend to be a much crappier quality. The paper is much thinner, so it is possible to see the text faintly on the other side. This makes it much more difficult to read the text. Still, you save so much money that it is often worth it.
I doubt I could have read a book on a TV, but I have read one of the Ender's Game books (can't remember which one) on a CRT running at 85Hz, and it didn't bother me at all. I haven't tried reading a book on an LCD yet, but I just downloaded a free book a few weeks ago that I look forward to trying when I have the time.
I was simply taking issue with the idea that spending more money will get you a better printer. That LaserJet 9040 that you linked to is very similar to the printers in the post I mentioned, and it's obvious that the rather high price tag did not net the poster quality printers.
> The point was that if you want a printer on which the manufacturer didn't try to cut costs, you can just pay more money (but still less than the old hardware cost) and get a brand new printer which will be better than the old piece of junk in every way. Like, oh I dunno, this LaserJet 9040.
Possibly something extra is being powered down. My first guess is the network adapter is normally powered on while the system is off to provide features like Wake On Lan. The Standby mode could actually power off the network adapter, saving an extra Watt.
Most of the unions in the US that I know of organized during times of extreme economic trial, so if the economy tanks into a serious depression then it is certainly still possible.
It would be nice for there to be standards within IT, but I'm not sold on unions. The idea is good, but the rampant corruption that always seems to occur is not.
If I know a plumber has successfully cleared a difficult drain, I congratulate and thank them. Just because it isn't something I necessarily want to do doesn't mean I shouldn't respect good work when I see it.
Ditto. I went ahead and installed it as I wasn't sure if it offered any extra functionality I'd be interested in. Obviously it wasn't so it's easy to uninstall. My wife though was offered it several days after I installed it (she declined install).
Wow, you were totally right. I checked and the BIOS was set to use S1 instead of S3. I set it to S3 and the power usage during standby dropped to 4 Watts.
The funny thing is that it uses 5 Watts while off, so it uses less power while in standby than while off.
I recently accrued an old Shuttle PC and installed Windows XP on it for a media center. Suspend worked just fine, except that when I measured power usage, I found little savings.
Idle: 60W Suspend: 55W Hibernate: 5W.
In the end, I ended up having to hibernate the system, which is sad because I can't power it on remotely with the keyboard anymore.
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Hate to reply to my own post, but I wanted to clarify my point.
Because the process will use 100% of a CPU core for a unit of time, a higher powered CPU will expend more energy than a lower powered CPU as they will both be active for the same amount of time, but the higher powered CPU is designed to consumer more power per unit of time. If the process was limited by a complex calculation, then the higher powered CPU would finish faster and spend more time in a sleep state, which would likely use less power overall.
This is obviously poor programming to be using so many CPU cycles while simply waiting, but there is little that can be done about a Microsoft process.
What seems to be happening is that Windows 7 detects high CPU usage, so sets the CPU in turbo mode, consuming much more power. Because Vista and 7 will have the process consume all of the CPU for an identical amount of time, the 7 system ends up using more power. The solution would be to fix the process that consume CPU cycles while waiting, which should result in a much more responsive and power saving system under Windows 7 than Vista.
The update process uses 100% of a CPU core while it is waiting on some thread to finish. If the pending thread finishes quickly, then little CPU is used. Or the pending thread can take forever or lock up, and you end up using a significant amount of CPU and energy.
Would you provide links to solar panel projects that are net energy positive (have provided more energy than they took to produce and install). Heck, link to projects that are at least half way to paying off their real (un-subsidized) price.
There are good solar projects out there, but solar panels are far from efficient. Solar panels are a great way to get electricity in remote locations. For supplementing grid power, they are poor at best.
I think (hope) that some day this will change, but we are not there yet. And at the current speed, we won't be there for decades.
The dollar per watt on nuclear power is significantly lower, and also increases energy security. Also, when the solar systems stop working correctly in a year due to bad wiring, they will be worthless. There are solar panel systems all over the place that aren't hooked up due to them breaking and no one wanting to spend the money to fix them (one of the big problems with lots of small scale energy projects).
I don't know about this particular program, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were federal funds involved. If there are federal funds involved, all tax payers are paying for the systems.
Two problems:
1. You are still paying a lot of money so that one person has their utility bill drop to almost nothing (and no, almost all funds for this come from taxes). And your bill will never drop an appreciable amount.
2. Scales of efficiency. You spend a lot more dollars per watt to install a dinky solar panel on one person's house than you do building a solar plant. They only make sense as a personal investment, but solar panels are still a terrible investment due to production costs.
I will direct all end users I meet to email you before taking any actions. If we all try our hardest, I think we can fulfill your dream.
I know that Microsoft for some time has been trying to push their own PDF replacement (XPS). However, I've never been able to get XPS files to work properly. And I've never met anyone that's been able to get them to work properly. (Sometimes creation fails with an error or you have a file that is too small to be valid, or nothing will open them up or have them look even vaguely correct.)
I'm thinking a replicator won't make you a bigger house, or fix your current one. There is more to poverty than just having enough food. Although I suppose you could simply replicate a million large legos and build the house of your dreams? Vertically?
Still, if food, energy, and materials are essentially free for all to use, just how does an economy work?
I can't find anywhere in the study that describes a speed difference, other than the impact of actually fixing the errors. Do you have a link to a study that describes the performance impact that doesn't require a subscription?
He took beautiful lemons and made poison out of them.
Nah, he just squirted the juice in everyone's eyes.
I'm confused why we're still using asphalt shingles in the first place. Wouldn't it be easier/faster/better/cheaper to do something else?
For example, one of these:
1. Spray a water proof coating onto the wood roof.
2. Stick a water proof sheet to the wood roof.
3. Cover the roof with galvanized steel or hard plastic.
I will never understand people's fetish with covering their houses with at asphalt shingles instead of almost anything else. When considering energy costs during summer, dark shingles made of tar seems like a poor choice.
Yes, but subspace was still apparently affected by real space such that traveling through a star or black hole was a bad idea.
I just want to add that while they are legally made, and cheaper, they tend to be a much crappier quality. The paper is much thinner, so it is possible to see the text faintly on the other side. This makes it much more difficult to read the text. Still, you save so much money that it is often worth it.
I doubt I could have read a book on a TV, but I have read one of the Ender's Game books (can't remember which one) on a CRT running at 85Hz, and it didn't bother me at all. I haven't tried reading a book on an LCD yet, but I just downloaded a free book a few weeks ago that I look forward to trying when I have the time.
I was simply taking issue with the idea that spending more money will get you a better printer. That LaserJet 9040 that you linked to is very similar to the printers in the post I mentioned, and it's obvious that the rather high price tag did not net the poster quality printers.
> The point was that if you want a printer on which the manufacturer didn't try to cut costs, you can just pay more money (but still less than the old hardware cost) and get a brand new printer which will be better than the old piece of junk in every way. Like, oh I dunno, this LaserJet 9040.
Funny you should mention that.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1388721&cid=29606231
Perhaps you simply need to find better places to spend your free time?
Possibly something extra is being powered down. My first guess is the network adapter is normally powered on while the system is off to provide features like Wake On Lan. The Standby mode could actually power off the network adapter, saving an extra Watt.
Most of the unions in the US that I know of organized during times of extreme economic trial, so if the economy tanks into a serious depression then it is certainly still possible.
It would be nice for there to be standards within IT, but I'm not sold on unions. The idea is good, but the rampant corruption that always seems to occur is not.
If I know a plumber has successfully cleared a difficult drain, I congratulate and thank them. Just because it isn't something I necessarily want to do doesn't mean I shouldn't respect good work when I see it.
I enjoy disabling the multitude of pointless extra services every time someone updates iTunes.
Ditto. I went ahead and installed it as I wasn't sure if it offered any extra functionality I'd be interested in. Obviously it wasn't so it's easy to uninstall. My wife though was offered it several days after I installed it (she declined install).
Wow, you were totally right. I checked and the BIOS was set to use S1 instead of S3. I set it to S3 and the power usage during standby dropped to 4 Watts.
The funny thing is that it uses 5 Watts while off, so it uses less power while in standby than while off.
I recently accrued an old Shuttle PC and installed Windows XP on it for a media center. Suspend worked just fine, except that when I measured power usage, I found little savings.
Idle: 60W
Suspend: 55W
Hibernate: 5W.
In the end, I ended up having to hibernate the system, which is sad because I can't power it on remotely with the keyboard anymore.