Desktop computer

[Brooke]

I almost never turn my computers off at home or work.  I set them up to go to sleep or hybrid sleep.  Sleep or hybrid sleep uses about the same power as them being powered down, and from sleep or hybrid sleep, time from touching a key to getting the log-in screen is a couple of seconds typically, and from the login screen to first browser window another few seconds.  Also, with the machine on hybrid sleep, you can have it wake at night to do a full scan of your hard disk or whatever other tasks take a long time that you don't want to do during the day.  Once you try using hybrid sleep instead of shutdown, you won't want to go back to doing shutdowns every day. 

[MrRiplEy[H]]

no but i did have bf3 installed for a while...always got in among the first 5.

BF3 doesn't have this problem. It has a wait period for spawn. I remember having to wait always for the other players to get their loading ready while playing on the Revodrive 3 Black ops then again lets fast players spawn rape the slow ones.

[gyrene81]

I almost never turn my computers off at home or work.  I set them up to go to sleep or hybrid sleep.  Sleep or hybrid sleep uses about the same power as them being powered down, and from sleep or hybrid sleep, time from touching a key to getting the log-in screen is a couple of seconds typically, and from the login screen to first browser window another few seconds.  Also, with the machine on hybrid sleep, you can have it wake at night to do a full scan of your hard disk or whatever other tasks take a long time that you don't want to do during the day.  Once you try using hybrid sleep instead of shutdown, you won't want to go back to doing shutdowns every day. 

i'm not concerned with power usage, at full load my system will use $1 a day in electricity, that's nothing compared to my ac unit. my drives do power down after 1 hour of inactivity, but that is as far as i go with powering down or using screen savers or sleep mode. my system is booted and ready to rock in less than 30 seconds as it is, relying on microsh@t's crapware version of power management compatibility with my system hardware won't make it any faster.

aside from that, i'd love to see what all is sitting cached on your system after a few days of not shutting down...did you happen to disable the magic packet readiness on your network adaptor?

[Brooke]

aside from that, i'd love to see what all is sitting cached on your system after a few days of not shutting down...did you happen to disable the magic packet readiness on your network adaptor?

I haven't disabled the "awake on magic packet" stuff, but I don't use it.

My work computer is typically up for probably a month between reboots.

[gyrene81]

I haven't disabled the "awake on magic packet" stuff, but I don't use it.

My work computer is typically up for probably a month between reboots.

disable it for security purposes...not that it's a common thing to be concerned with on a home pc but, disable it.

a month without reboot?    be grateful you don't have to call me for your computer problems at work...  i had one guy that would inevitably put in a support call every month...something not working on his system or it was slow or blah blah blah. i'd get to his desk, ask him what he's been doing, look at task manager then reboot the system...i finally had to tell him if he didn't shut the system down at least once a week, i would have the help desk make sure he reboots his system before they take any action to get his issues addressed.

[Brooke]

disable it for security purposes...not that it's a common thing to be concerned with on a home pc but, disable it.

Good advice -- I just did.  I agree about very little risk (it being behind an router and a firewall), but as I don't use it, why keep it on, eh?

a month without reboot?    be grateful you don't have to call me for your computer problems at work... 

 

It used to be that one had to reboot Windows systems often (even spawned a joke of the MCRE for "Microsoft Certified Reboot Engineer", and jokes at my previous company from the Linux/Debian guys about MS ads saying "I haven't been down to the server room in days!" -- they thought that was hilarious with our Debian machines up for months).  But these days, it doesn't seem to cause any problem keeping them up always.  I've worked with perhaps 200+ Windows systems over the past 5-7 years that we kept on always (reboots if needed for updates or reboots upon any software trouble as a first step).  That way, they can get virus checked and backed up every night when they aren't being used.  At home, I only recently started leaving them on always once I realized that that sleep and hybrid sleep don't take appreciably more power than turning them off completely.

We have Windows machines that run our production equipment (custom Java apps that run on Windows XP).  We've been using them for over 5 years, and they not only are always on, but a single crash of anything costs $hundreds or $thousands in wasted consumables and sets back production by 3 days.  That almost never happens.  The last time it happened (and I can't remember a time before that -- not to say it hasn't happened, but not often enough that I even remember the time before last), it was due to hardware failure, not a software or OS crash.

[gyrene81]

oy you gots some expensive stuff going on there i can understand why you wouldn't want to reboot unless it's absolutely necessary...

at one time i wanted to be a windows systern admin...then i got into novell and now unix/linux.  our windows servers at the app tier keep way too much cruft to run more than a year without problems...especially the vm's (fyi, oracle apps suxxorz on all platforms).

[Brooke]

oy you gots some expensive stuff going on there i can understand why you wouldn't want to reboot unless it's absolutely necessary...

at one time i wanted to be a windows systern admin...then i got into novell and now unix/linux.  our windows servers at the app tier keep way too much cruft to run more than a year without problems...especially the vm's (fyi, oracle apps suxxorz on all platforms).

Yep, Windows machines as servers for Internet stuff, database transactions, etc. probably are not a great pick; and even our Windows machines that seem very stable wouldn't, I don't think, stay up for more than a year without a reboot (I've never gotten that far before needing a reboot for updates, installation, or something).

[MrRiplEy[H]]

We have Windows machines that run our production equipment (custom Java apps that run on Windows XP).  We've been using them for over 5 years

One must wonder why Windows XP was selected for anything remotely mission critical. A big fail on someones part there IMO. I'm surprised your systems have been able to run 1 week without crashing lot alone years! So you don't do any security updates I guess and the XPs have no physical connection to Internet.

[Brooke]

One must wonder why Windows XP was selected for anything remotely mission critical. A big fail on someones part there IMO. I'm surprised your systems have been able to run 1 week without crashing lot alone years! So you don't do any security updates I guess and the XPs have no physical connection to Internet.

I chose it.  I did that for a lot of reasons that I can go over if you want me to explain (although please don't ask me to go into it if you're not honestly interested, as it will take me some time to type up).  It is clearly not a big fail since these machines and the software on them have just about perfect up time records over the years, not just in our own production facility but in customer facilities in numerous other locations in the US and in other countries (installations in UK, Italy, France, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Russia), including biology labs with little or no IT support.  Yes, we do security updates, and they are hooked to the Internet (through routers and firewalls).

These are for device/equipment control, not as a web server, huge database server, etc.  The software they run is software we (mostly I) wrote.  I would not recommend Windows machines for running a bank, or airline reservations, or a web hosting business, etc.  I wouldn't pick it for airliner flight-control software.  Different realms have different characteristics and different sets of solutions that work best.

I have worked on a lot of different systems (Apple II's, Macs, Lisas, Sun workstations, NeXT workstations, DOS PC's, Windows 95 PC's, OS/2 PC's, Unix PC's, and various microcontrollers, even a little on old Amdahl mainframes) in a lot of different languages (Fortran, LISP, Pascal, BASIC, assembly of various sorts, Prolog, C/C++, Perl, Python, Java) and done a lot of coding for process automation and instrumentation control (for small companies as well as large cap and multinational companies).  I'd still pick what I did as the best course for those various reasons I can go into.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I chose it.  I did that for a lot of reasons that I can go over if you want me to explain (although please don't ask me to go into it if you're not honestly interested, as it will take me some time to type up).  It is clearly not a big fail since these machines and the software on them have just about perfect up time records over the years, not just in our own production facility but in customer facilities in numerous other locations in the US and in other countries (installations in UK, Italy, France, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Russia), including biology labs with little or no IT support.  Yes, we do security updates, and they are hooked to the Internet (through routers and firewalls).

These are for device/equipment control, not as a web server, huge database server, etc.  The software they run is software we (mostly I) wrote.  I would not recommend Windows machines for running a bank, or airline reservations, or a web hosting business, etc.  I wouldn't pick it for airliner flight-control software.  Different realms have different characteristics and different sets of solutions that work best.

I have worked on a lot of different systems (Apple II's, Macs, Lisas, Sun workstations, NeXT workstations, DOS PC's, Windows 95 PC's, OS/2 PC's, Unix PC's, and various microcontrollers, even a little on old Amdahl mainframes) in a lot of different languages (Fortran, LISP, Pascal, BASIC, assembly of various sorts, Prolog, C/C++, Perl, Python, Java) and done a lot of coding for process automation and instrumentation control (for small companies as well as large cap and multinational companies).  I'd still pick what I did as the best course for those various reasons I can go into.

I guess you've been pretty lucky since XP is suspectible to rapidly spreading worms especially when combined with java and internet access. Are those more like embedded systems where users practically never actually access the desktops? If you need uptime, how do you perform updates? Most of them require a reboot.

I would be crapping my pants if I was responsible for a system like that lol. Best of luck!

[Skuzzy]

Do you play black ops? It's physically impossible for you to be first on map if other players are using SSDs

Not 100% accurate.  If the map has been loaded before it could still be retained in system RAM which is faster than an SSD.  Windows 7 is pretty aggressive about that.  Personally, I do not care for that, but it is what it is.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Not 100% accurate.  If the map has been loaded before it could still be retained in system RAM which is faster than an SSD.  Windows 7 is pretty aggressive about that.  Personally, I do not care for that, but it is what it is.

I haven't played much BO but watching my kid play it on hdd his maps always loaded from the hdd and he has win7 with 8gb ram. So it doesn't cache as far as I can see. He's running the game from raid-0 3x320gb WD hdds and still he gets killed before spawn on every round.

Plus his wording 'always' implies it can't be cached as the first load comes always from the mass memory.

[gyrene81]

I haven't played much BO but watching my kid play it on hdd his maps always loaded from the hdd and he has win7 with 8gb ram. So it doesn't cache as far as I can see. He's running the game from raid-0 3x320gb WD hdds and still he gets killed before spawn on every round.

what drives are you using and what is the stripe sizing on the raid configuration? i've seen raid0 configurations improve the performance of cheap drives but, that was using hardware raid with actual raid controllers, not software raid.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

what drives are you using and what is the stripe sizing on the raid configuration? i've seen raid0 configurations improve the performance of cheap drives but, that was using hardware raid with actual raid controllers, not software raid.

WD3200AAKS drives, 128kb stripe size. Single drive gives around 80mb/s in raid 0 the 3 drives score 168/167 Mb/s sequential read/write. It doesn't quite scale 1:1 but I'll take double performance any day. And this is software raid.