Matt’s Blog

Archive for October, 2006

Suspending Global Warming

Monday, October 9th, 2006

Lots of geek types, myself included, tend to have machines running all the time, or at least for extended periods of time. But is it always necessary, or rather would it be that bad to turn some of them off when they are not being used?

Obviously if there is a server doing something useful I’m not saying shut it down, but there are other machines where I’m sure it’s not so necessary. I used to leave my desktop machine on 24 hours a day for example, just so that all the documents I was working on would stay open.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot more since moving to using my laptop instead of a desktop machine for most day to day tasks. Now that I’m using Ubuntu Dapper on my laptop the suspend-to-RAM functionality is much improved. Previously my laptop would fail to resume more than one in ten times that I suspended it and that made it too flakey for general usage, but now, with Dapper, it seems to work flawlessley. It is so fast too… only approx 15 seconds to suspend and another 15 seconds to resume, all my documents open just as I left them. It makes me think that we should all be using this functionality much more, for desktop machines as well as for laptops.

So my call today is for everyone to just think about the machines that they leave switched on for extended periods of time and just consider whether any of them could be put into a lower power state when not being actively used… Even consider having your machines go into auto-suspend if they are idle for an hour or two…

Computers don’t use too much power, so in the grand scale of things compared to, say, transportation and heavy industry, it’s not going to make a great deal of difference, but we should all probably be looking to do our bit…

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Archive for October, 2006

Suspending Global Warming

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