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Minimize Power Settings?

B

budec

Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2002
Messages
748
I'm trying to reduce my electrical bill. I have 3 computers (ouch!)
All are Windows XP with LCD Monitors.

We use the computers a lot during the day, so don't want to shutdown.
(We use them for business and personal use and would take to long to wait for them to boot. 5 to 10 minutes a time, 50 or so times a day).
Basically have them available when we need them, but minimize power consumption when they aren't in use.

What's the difference between system standby and hibernation?
Also I run FAH on all of them. Is that going to keep them from idling down their power settings?

One is Core2Duo, other is Dual Xeon 1.70 GHZ (Pent 4? They aren't hyper thread, two physical CPUs) and other is Dual AMD MP.
Eventually we want to upgrade to more power friendly computers; but don't have the cash right now and just trying to find the optimal setting between "savings power" and "availability"
 
FAH uses your CPU at 100% or nearly pretty much all the time. Do not run it if you want to save money on your electrical bill.

Have the machines that support it drop in to S3 standby after 10-15 minutes of inactivity (assuming none of these are always on server types). This will keep them in a very low power mode but readily accessible; it shouldn't take more than ~30 seconds to come out of S3 to full functionality on most machines. You can tell the difference between S1 and S3 because in S3 the fans will all stop and only the power light will blink slowly to indicate standby, whereas S1 the fans will remain on. (I think... not my area of expertise admittedly. I do know S3 uses less power than S1)

Those machines that don't support S3, have them hibernate after a similar period of time. Hibernation effectively shuts the machine all the way off (not low power standby) so it's even lower draw, but the way it does it means the machine will take a bit longer to come back up (1-2 minutes generally). What it does is write the entire contents of RAM to the harddrive before shutting down, then reads it back when you start back up. This is faster than a standard boot-up, but not nearly as fast as keeping everything in RAM and turning everything else off (S3 standby).
 
budec said:
What's the difference between system standby and hibernation?
Click to expand...
Standby puts the computer in a low-power state, which saves a lot of power, but still keeps the computer on. Hibernate saves the system state to disk and turns off the computer, so it doesn't consume any power at all. Hibernate takes longer to start up from, but it saves more power than standby.
budec said:
Also I run FAH on all of them. Is that going to keep them from idling down their power settings?
Click to expand...
Yes. Folding@Home will keep the computers at full load all the time that they are on and it is running.
 
You're running F@H on 3 PCs and can't figure out how to cut electricity bills?
How about not running F@H? -.- Keeping PCs on idle instead of full load will drop power use about 50%...
 
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