PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

every time my pc tries to go into standby... it says it can't because of scope. as soon as i close scope, then it's fine...

do i have to exit scope whenever i want to standby?

another question for you all... do you shut all your equipment off every time you are done? or do you just leave it on all the time? how much electricity does it use if it is left on?

On 2005-02-21 16:22, ___crisis___1 wrote:
every time my pc tries to go into standby... it says it can't because of scope. as soon as i close scope, then it's fine...

do i have to exit scope whenever i want to standby?

another question for you all... do you shut all your equipment off every time you are done? or do you just leave it on all the time? how much electricity does it use if it is left on?

About standby, yes, you have to turn off SFP. Quick fix for this, don't use standby, or use a minimal SFP project that doesn't take any time to load. I use j9k's micromixer thingy in my main project, takes about 2-3 second to load.

About leaving equipement running, I tend to do both, depending on wether I want to get bothered by it at nite =P. SFP is still fine on my box after leaving it running for a few days, but restarting the OS once in a while surely isn't a bad idea. I wouldn't bother too much about electricity costs for leaving a machine running, if you live anywhere near winter, your heating costs are going to be drastically higher whatever goes into leaving the computer running.

Also, XP has pretty quick bootup and shutdown times, around 10 seconds on my box, so standby doesn't make too much sense for me.

well, because doing a cold boot to your pc causes unseen damage. everytime you power on your pc, it has a surge of electricity that runs through all the components. this will not do imidiate damage, but after awhile it starts to take it's toll on your system.

Eh? You don't have to cold boot it, just power it down and up normally?

Also I'm really not sure about the unseen damage part, if you have alot of applications with files open and stuff, you might damage your files/filesystem, but you'll need more than just cold booting a machine to cause physical damages to components, unless you have a really really really cheapo and/or faulty power supply. On a purely electrical/physical level, I don't think there's any difference between a clean shutdown, standby and a cold-boot, the clean shutdown is only to prevent damage to the OS/filesystem, not to the physical components.

Back in the DOS days, there weren't even any clean-shutdown procedure (just an interrupt you could call to reboot the machine.) I've done *countless* cold reboots of machines running DOS, and can't say I've ever run into any trouble (same with the Amigas and all other machines I've messed it.) In fact I still have my old 486DX-50 with original power supply, and it's still working fine.

I can't say I've noticed any trouble with any more recent machines either. A major surge on the electrical circuit might cause some damage, like something strong enough to blow a fuse, otherwise I don't think there's any trouble with just powering down the machine.

Still, I don't see what cold-booting has to do with standby mode vs normal shutdown =P.

because if you shutdown, then you have to do a coldboot when you want to use the machine again.

And how is standby mode different?

My current router/firewall is a 7-8 years old AMD K6-2 350 (my original Pulsar machine =P) with original PSU and all. It's been in constant use in the last 8 years. It must have been cold-booted thousands of times or more (once a day more or less,) and is still happily purring away. It's constantly on nowadays, and I can't say I noticed any problems with it.

I shut down my system daily. It is being running flawless for years now. Specially after a defrag I shutdown completely and restart. and sometimes I cold boot the sucker with no harm to my PC.

don't need standby.
this comp here, 4 years, lots 'o' shutdowns.

I never shut off any of the machines in here...

I agree - skip standby and shut it down. It's typically just as quick to do a shutdown, plus: no OS is hurt by an occaisional restart - instead it usually helps >>> Particularly for Windows 98/ME. Windows NT/2000/XP are much more stable but it can't hurt it! The "power-on damage" thing is misinformation from about 20 years ago that borders on the mythical. It was legend at one time that the initiation of power flow into the system on a repeated basis would, over time, degenerate the IC's themselves (the silicon). Also, that warm-up and cool-down cycles (i.e. physical expansion/contraction) could be detrimental to the system. I've never seen any real evidence that this is valid. Lots of evidence to the contrary, apparently.

O/T, but - Another myth people tend to subscribe to are that defrags will fix software problems (NOT!) and that <i><ul>substantial</ul></i> performance is to be gained by frequent defragging of hard drives (I know people who will do this almost daily). But it takes HOURS to defrag a HDD of a contemporary size! Is all that seek activity good for the HD? Much of it for files that would not otherwise be untouched for weeks/months. Bottom line is an occaisional defrag (monthly? depending on use) is not bad, I guess, but expect only minimal performance increase in most cases. If the drive performs that badly, it's probably best to look into a faster drive!