berlin%bu-albert.BU.EDU@bu-it.bu.edu (David Fickes) (12/21/88)
Has anyone actually asked Sun whether we should shut down our display screens at night or on the weekends? We tend to have several machines idle for a couple of days at a time and I've been wondering. Currently, we just scrlock them. [[ Certainly you should take measures to save the phosphor in them. Running screenlock should be sufficient for this. It just needs to be something that changes periodically so that no one image gets a chance to get "burned in". I understand that turning them off and back on actually puts quite a bit more "stress" on the components than just leaving them on overnight, thus reducing the monitor's lifetime. Of course, this could just be an urban legend---I have no solid sources or research to back this up. --wnl ]] - david David K. Fickes dfickes@bu-albert.bu.edu The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein ...harvard!bu-it!bu-albert!dfickes Princeton University Press / Boston University berlin@buita.bu.edu 745 Commonwealth Avenue - room 541 617/ 353-9249 Boston, MA 02215 617/ 783-4301
zjat02@uunet.uu.net (Jon A. Tankersley) (01/13/89)
Depending on the type of Monitor, it is better to turn it off and back on every weekend/night. The Ikegami(sp) had a poor MTBF rating for the power supply and a not much better one for the Monitor itself. We had Ickky's dying after about a year because we left them on with screenlock running. Now we turn them off a night and on weekends. Screenlock is run when user's log off and a screenblank like substitute is being written to blank and lock idle screens after so many minutes.... -tank- -- #include <disclaimer.h> /* nobody knows the trouble I .... */
"Bruce_Hamilton.OsbuSouth"@xerox.com (01/25/89)
I'd like to share some knowledge and ask if anyone has done cost studies on powering down entire Sun processors (not just the displays). I can't speak to the various models of Sun, but at Xerox a couple of years ago, we did some cost studies and controlled experiments in powering off our own Xerox model 8010 and 6085 workstations. We discovered -yes, there is SOME "infant mortality" at the board level when you start cycling power each day on machines which used to stay on all the time -however, the total savings in power is HUGE. A buck a night power saved per workstation times an installed base of about 20K workstations gets into the megabucks REAL FAST. Conclusion: except for the very oldest model 8010's with a separate disk box, which tends to throw a drive belt on power-up, we recommend powering down everything except public server machines each night. I'd be surprised if the conclusions were much different for Sun machines, since to a first approximation, electronics is electronics (power usage vs. MTBF under various conditions of cycling power). --Bruce CSNet: Hamilton.osbuSouth@Xerox.COM UUCP: xerox.com!hamilton.osbuSouth 213/333-8075
jeremy@kheops.cmi.no (Jeremy Cook) (02/03/89)
>-yes, there is SOME "infant mortality" at the board level when you start >cycling power each day on machines which used to stay on all the time >-however, the total savings in power is HUGE.... Ah yes but equipment budgets are quite different from overheads. I doubt if one could convince the administration to give some of the money saved on electricity to pay for repairs! -- Jeremy Cook