Debate: turn computer off or leave on woodmoke's take

[GreyGeek]

I've never had an HD fail on me either, Bloggsworth, but out of a collection of 500 workstations at work, about 1 HD per month would fail regularly. The big problem with hardware failures was the lack of ethics in vendors. I think it was Seagate, IIRC, who was having financial problems and began sending out returned defective drives with new sales to keep income up, but it caught up with them. We had a contract with DELL for towers (servers), minitowers (desktops) and displays. During the period when Intel, which had an exclusive video chip contract with DELL, caught DELL sending out machines with AMI video chips, Intel immediately cut the business relationship with DELL and it caused an immediate $75M drop in revenues for DELL. That almost put them under. During that time DELL began sending out defective display units, and we were experiencing a 30% failure rate for displays on new DELL computer systems. DELL would have lost the State contract except for the fact that the purchasing department had no clue about computers and worked only with the idea of the cheapest bidder.

[dibl]

My desktop system runs 24/7/365. I built it in 2010 and probably will replace it next year just because I don't trust old electronics with important data.

I bought my first IBM-compatible from Northgate in about 1985 and have bought and (more recently) built quite a few, for myself and for others, since then. I've only ever had one hard drive, a Seagate, fail and that was probably 1987 or so. I've stayed mostly with Western Digital in recent years, although I'm sure they can break too. I had bit of a scare last year with a pair of WD1000s that had been running a BTRFS filesystem for 3 years. Upon observing that a fsck found some errors, I instantly bought a replacement pair of the same model of drives, and reinstalled the BTRFS filesystem and moved my data over. But then I made individual partition tables on the old drives, and formatted them ext4 and ran long SMART tests on them individually, and neither one showed any problem. So now I use them for backups. Whatever was going on apparently was not with the drives themselves. I have had at least two power supplies fail, and the last CRT monitor in my house died last year, a year after the second-to-last CRT died. It's a funny phenomenon that we (a) expect these things to turn on and work correctly every time we need them, while at the same time (b) we know with 100.0% certainty that they will definitely fail to do so one of these days. Human nature, I guess.

[life0riley]

I only had one Western Digital IDE drive fail on me with Windows XP. I was getting cyclic redundancy errors. I was able to get most of my data off before it was inaccessible. I hear more thrashing noises from hard drives with Windows than with Linux I'm general. For the record I powered down that Win XP box at night.

[Shabakthanai]

I am a bit older than lots of you. My computer is my company, my entertainment, and more. I never turn it off. At my age, I only sleep an hour or two at a time, so usually I am a bit tired. Nevertheless, if a movie is good enough, and I am tired, playing the movie is like taking a sleeping pill. I don't want to miss anything, so of course, I go to sleep almost immediately. If I did not use that as a tool, I don't think I would ever sleep.

If you are alone all the time, you need voices. That is how I get mine. And although I usually don't play power demanding games, I do have SSD's, quite a bit of very fast memory and an 8 core processor. I appreciate a 10 to 15 second restart time and no wait when opening applications. I can't say I have even considered the cost of energy, because I would be willing to pay a little more if some time is wasted, yet I still hate waste.

I have been around long enough to not trust what the government is offering or what people who give advice on how to reduce your costs with what they provide. I guess, I feel that since most of the important stuff on a computer doesn't have many moving parts, expansion and contraction of electrical gizmos is a greater worry when concerning use-abuse, and HDD's are so cheap, replacement from time to time seems a better proposition than wearing them out because they are always running.

One thing I emphatically declare is that Kubuntu generally is the very best for everyone, this forum is a top notch helper for dummies like me, and I love you guys You keep my mind moving when it generally wants to stop.

[woodsmoke]

GGs reply...........yes........ to this person.........it is not "the Linux thing" it ...seems to this poster to be a manufacturer thing...

Besides...... The Johnniman was dragging hardware off the beltways and it worked fine for this poster but then, dunno..............sometimes stuff that comes off the beltways can be iffy..... or not...

maybe ...........stuff off the beltways............ maybe...........dunno.........floater chinee food?

woodsmoke