Power Schemes which do you use and why...

...also what are the problems you have had with these settings and what did you do to correct or overcome them? This ties in and is related to my poll on running 24/7? question. This was not set up as a poll in the polling area because I am looking for answers and discussion not raw numbers.

It looks as if the majority turn off or use power saving modes. I had some difficulty with power saving modes even when running XP on a vintage 2001 Compaq system. However, recently I notice my APC Battery Backup will put the system in Hibernation. This is for brief power outages. This seems to work well. So maybe my issues of years ago seem to be solved perhaps as part of MS updates and patches.

Please do not link me to MS tech links for an explaination I would like your own words or if you know of alternative link sites that you think are really good on this topic post that.

What are the real differences b/w Hibernation, Standby, and Hard Disk Turn Off under the power schemes. I assume there is no hard disk turn off with the other power options.

I surely want to know if you had crash issues, corrupt data and so on. Do software firewalls still stealth or block incoming attacks while in these modes. For example would an incoming attack that manage to get through Windows firewall wake a system up from Hibernation or Standby? Or is it very unlikely anything could get through Windows firewall and cause problems during these power saving states. Please confine your answers for XP and Vista OS

 

I'm on XP (Home) SP2, and use the Home-Office Desktop scheme with all shutdown/standby settings at "never". Typically I'm on the computer 16-18 hours a day (I'm disabled/retired, so the computer pretty much is my life), and so far have had no problems with corruption except rarely for individual files which are usually fairly easy to replace.

My system's something like 5 years old now, and on the rare occasion I do a full surface scan with ScanDisk (a weekly data scan is my norm), there's still no hint yet of any bad sectors.

About my only concession to inactivity is that I've agreed with my ISP that we'll set up at both ends to disconnect my dialup after 30 minutes of internet inactivity. There's been quite a few times I've discovered I've gotten involved in an offline game or whatever and forgotten to disconnect first - no point tying up their servers unnecessarily, right?

 

Hibernation powers off teh comp except the memory contents are first saved to disk, so everything is just like you left it. In Standby the comp remains powered on but it goes into a low power mode (components like hard disk and monitor do shut off). And for Hard Disk Turn Off, I dont see it under Power Schemes but I guess it just turns off the disk.

As for my chosen power scheme, I use the minimal scheme. Since I generally leave my (overclocked) comp on for folding@home and/or torrent downloading, I dont care much for power saving.

 

If Standby lets the Hard Drive spin down and stop, looks like that is the ticket for me. Does the monitor turn off or just go into low power mode? I wonder what effect this would have on BOClean.

 

I always use standby on my systems as its a lot faster to switch in and out of.
I have had a couple of systems that refused to work correctly with standby. Very often certain components would fail to powerup again and i'd have to switch the power off and hope i didn't kill windows .

 

i used to use power settings of monitor turning off after 30minutes.
but then i would forget to change it when a made an image.
so i got lazy and put it on 4hours and left it there.
i have heard that quite a few computers dont work with standby in windows XP.
it is fixed in vista.
lodore

 

Good article in the current issue of Maximum PC magazine on system standby, the various modes, setting it up, advantages, etc.

 

Can you post a link for me. Thanks.

 

mercurie,

It's in the current newsstand edition. It looks like their web site is one issue behind (so it won't show up online for a couple of weeks).

 

Thank you Appreciate your reply.