Hi there - I'm up late tonite, so if you are too you'll have something to read!
I've heard two very different opinions, both logical, and both from very
reliable sources. I guess it really depends on whether or not you have
personally experienced problems with APM (the advanced power management
settings) and Windows XP and rejuvinating the USB threads when a computer
comes out of standby or hibernation mode.
One opinion is that turning on a PC after it has been off for at least an
hour (a cold start) may cause physical temperature shock to microcircuits
within IC's or the CPU. Those Sony Vaio's are so well made tho and so
low-temp running anyway that I would not be as concerned about temp shock
from a cold start.
Bringing a computer to life from standby will result in less incidence of
temp-shock from waking up, but bring with it a host of technical tweaks and
settings that you will have to ask other people about or experiment with on
your own. The BIOS APM settings have settings for which kinds of devices,
I/O and IRQ's will either cause the system to wake or not. Also, some
devices can be set by default to not wake up upon resuming from standby. If
you want to do some research in advance, just search the knowledgebase at
support.microsoft.com and use a phrase like "resuming from standby" or
similar to get an idea of fixes to common problems.
A good tip is to use device manager to check the properties of each device
(if you encounter wake up problems resuming from standby) and look at the
"Power" tab or properties and make sure that there is a checkmark in the "Let
Windows turn off this device to save power..." some devices may have been
set to unchecked and windows and the APM won't be able to turn it back on
without growing arms and fingers.
Sony does a real good job with utilities and controls for their PC's that
you should probably try sticking with them as well. Don't mess around with
the BIOS directly if Sony has a little application or control program that
does the same thing. The reason they do things that way is because the
little control application is always much more intuitive and easier to
understand what is going on (and may restrict access to some settings that
you wouldn't want to mess around with anyway) I've seen BIOS settings that,
because the manual was translated into english from Japanese or Korean, the
meaning of some key words were exactly the opposite in meaning. Of course,
those were cheap computers.
The thing that tends to wear out on any computer, believe it or not, are
simply the fans and the drives (hard or optical) Most everything else you
will find will be generally functional from an electronics standpoint for
their typical rated 10-years estimated life. It's mechanical stuff -
material rubbing against other materials - that ends up failing, save
dropping the box from your rooftop or other unnatural and unexpected shock or
damage. I have a Sony DRU-500A DVD Writer optical drive today that was in a
piece of garbage mini-formfactor PC called "Shuttle" and the whole box ended
up thrown out a 2nd story window (yes, really... I had a mad-on that day and
weeks of begging for support from Shuttle were in vain) The $300 box looked
horrible. The DVD burner was tweaked, the front bezel broken off, the tray
disk tray was bent, it was $300 just for the burner. I spent about 3 hours
carefully taking that Sony optical drive apart and gingerly bending, aligning
and putting things back together. A year later, it still works without so
much as one CRC error on any disk that I burn. Sony is good product and you
should always make sure to avoid the temptation to go direct to Microsoft for
updates before checking Sony's support site first. Sony hardware and
devices are very driver-specific and once a service pack from MS is applied,
invariably, the manufacturer-specific driver cannot be located on the fly so
the "wizard" (I hate that word!) grabs the nearest least-common-denominator
HCL approved driver which may be inferior to the one you already had.
As far as I'm concerned, I don't do hibernation except in the case of the
UPS shutdown from a general power failure. I would do the standby mode but
my fans won't go off over time so the box sits there and keeps humming as
loudly as it was when fully powered. I usually do a graceful shutdown and
let windows do its thing shutting it all down and I figure if my home PC is
on 4-6 hours a day, compared to leaving it on 24/7 I probably extended the
life of my computer by a factor of at least 4 because I turn it off at night.
At least the fans last longer!
Had enough yet? I could go on but that would be just plain mean.
PM
