monitor settings

[Jeff McNulty]

Just got a new NEC 22" monitor. To extend the life of it should I let the
screen saver run or make it shut down completely. Ive always been told its
better to leave electronics on than to make them turn on and off all the
time.

thanks

 

[johns]

better to leave electronics on than to make them turn on and off all the

Not really. Use to the power supplies in most PCs
and peripherals came on with big voltage spikes as
the caps charged up pulling a bunch of current through
coils and such. Those spikes could damage circuits
.... mainly transistors. Now, the supplies come up
without those spikes, plus the circuits are protected
much better. Now, the real damage is done by heat.
If a computer or monitor is left on continuously...
the hard drive bearings wear out ... connections that
have a continuous DC trickle through them corrode
and become noisy ... power cables and any connectors
stress and relax giving poor resistive connections
( especially power cords ) .. solder on the circuit boards
tends to oxidize and become brittle .. on and on. I
repair this stuff all the time, and when somebody brings
me a flakey PC that has been on for a couple of years,
I can do just about nothing. It is ruined, and there is
no way a smart tech would put a warrantee on something
like that. He would be taking it to raise for the rest
of his life ... for free. I turn my equipment off, and it
never wears out.

johns

 

[peter]

So on that note I take it your TV and stereo are on 24 hours a day???
I dont use a screen saver...useless pieces of crap.........
When I am done computing I just shut the monitor down and leave.But then I dont
have any kids to get into my system.
I have a 8 year old Viewsonic that still functions nicely without any problems
as well a 2 year old LCD
peter

 

[John Fryatt]

Scrrensavers, as I understand it, come from the earlier days of PCs etc.
when we were using green screens with long-persistence phosphors (which were
used to make slow refresh rates acceptable, I believe). A result of this was
that you could get screen burn-in if you left your Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet
up on screen for long periods. Hence the screen saver.

As far as I am aware modern monitors don't have this problem and so screen
savers aren't really necessary.
They persist as a bit of amusement basically.

My theory is to not turn off the kit if I go away for a little while, maybe
an hour or so, but to turn things off if I am away for longer periods, e.g.
over-night. My experience with hardware is that it often seems to fail on
power-up, so constant power-ups and downs are not a good thing. But also I'd
feel that just leaving the thing running for long periods unattended can't
be good for it either (as 'johns' said).

 

[First of One]

I follow the rule of thumb that if I'm not gonna use the monitor for an hour
or more, I shut it down. Otherwise, a screensaver runs after 5 minutes of
inactivity.

I also disable all the "power management" crap in BIOS so the monitor
doesn't sleep-cycle every time I reboot.