Power Saving Options, mean what?

[Ron Hardin]

What do the power saving options mean? I don't know if this is peculiar to Dell laptops or
not... for instance Control Panel/Display/Screen Saver/Power

``When computer is plugged in,

Turn off Monitor _after 30 mins_ (sample choice)
Turn off Hard Disks _after 30 mins_
System standby _after 30 mins_
System hibernates _after 30 mins_''

If I'm going to start up a program that runs for days, what do I have to choose
to keep the damn thing from stopping?

It's not clear what sort of thing sets off the timers. No keystrokes? No disk activity?
Nothing running? It doesn't say.

``Never'' is among the choices but I don't know whether I have to resort to that or not.

 

[HEMI-Powered]

Ron Hardin added these comments in the current discussion du
jour ...

What do the power saving options mean? I don't know if this
is peculiar to Dell laptops or not... for instance Control
Panel/Display/Screen Saver/Power

``When computer is plugged in,

Turn off Monitor _after 30 mins_ (sample choice)
Turn off Hard Disks _after 30 mins_
System standby _after 30 mins_
System hibernates _after 30 mins_''

If I'm going to start up a program that runs for days, what do
I have to choose to keep the damn thing from stopping?

It's not clear what sort of thing sets off the timers. No
keystrokes? No disk activity? Nothing running? It doesn't
say.

``Never'' is among the choices but I don't know whether I have
to resort to that or not.

I you think "green" or want to save money on electricity, these
things are for you. But, if you want the utmost in reliability,
I'd recommend not letting your HD go to sleep. I've not
personally tried it, but I've read numerous people complaining
about having trouble waking it up again. That may be just an
annoyance if a simple restart is necessary, or a bigger problem
if you had work-in-progress files saved, but you preferred to
keep them in memory for later.

The monitor and external HD issues were covered at length in
another thread, so I won't comment much there. I manually shut
off my Samsung 21" LCD primarily to save its pixels and to reduce
air conditioning load from the still fair amount of head it
generates. But, I generally leave my Maxtor 300 gig external
running 24x7.

If you know in advance you're going to be running a long program
or big download, and are at all apprehensive about it, just turn
it off. However, if the power saving systems are working
correctly they will NOT send anything to sleep except your
monitor if there's activity in the system, especially HD.

Windows, like all O/S's back to DOS, are constantly polling all
the various devices attached to it, such as keyboard, mouse, HD,
external, incoming update notifications, etc. If it doesn't see
any of this for the approximate time set, it will activate. That
is essentially how Windows decides how to do System Checkpoint
RPs, when it detects you're not busy working.

I don't like these things so don't have any practical experience,
but for you, why not just turn them all on and evaluate for
yourself if they are or are not something you want to do, and
experiment a little on the hibernate times?