The Lemon Fool

xeny wrote:

GeoffF100 wrote:I typically boot my machine several times a day,.

I'm intrigued - I boot my machine at most once a day, more typically once a week.

I expect that your electricity bill is more than mine. I only draw power when I am using one of my machines, not 24/7 for all of them.

GeoffF100 wrote:I expect that your electricity bill is more than mine. I only draw power when I am using one of my machines, not 24/7 for all of them.

Maybe, but perhaps not enough to worry about. My general use computer draws ~17 W at idle (the screens obviously power save) and less than that if asleep.

Let's assume electricity is 20p/kWh as a reasonable worst case. If I never sleep the machine (and in reality it sleeps or is off for say 12 hours a day) then it's 59 hours to use a kWh, or 20p.

8760 hours in the year, so that's (8760/59) kWh ->148Kwh, or about £30 if the machine were on full time. Given it's asleep about half the time, the total cost is going to be under £20, and obviously some of that electricity use would be unavoidable (i.e. it's when I'm using the machine), so I'd estimate the incremental cost of leaving it on is well under £10.

The machine has got 32 GB of RAM and a couple of 1TB SSDs, so it runs most of what I want as a VM, it's not a hardship to stick to the one machine, and I'm quite happy to accept spending an extra £10 or so a year to have the convenience of having everything available instantly with all the software etc as I left it.

One last thing to note - I hooked a watt meter up to the computer to check the power consumption, and it's quite noticeable that power draw just after boot is significantly higher - update clients running, processes starting etc - it peaked at around 60W. It looks as if it's not worth shutting a reasonably modern office spec PC down if you're going to use it again in the near future, purely on environmental grounds.

Obviously these numbers are different if you've got something with a huge high end GPU, or insist on turning SpeedStep and similar off.

xeny wrote:8760 hours in the year, so that's (8760/59) kWh ->148Kwh, or about £30 if the machine were on full time. Given it's asleep about half the time, the total cost is going to be under £20, and obviously some of that electricity use would be unavoidable (i.e. it's when I'm using the machine), so I'd estimate the incremental cost of leaving it on is well under £10.

I'm happy to leave my PC on when I'm not using it despite the small additional electricity consumption. I suspect that the components last longer provided overheating is not a problem. It runs about 12 hours a day.

RC

xeny wrote:

GeoffF100 wrote:I expect that your electricity bill is more than mine. I only draw power when I am using one of my machines, not 24/7 for all of them.

Maybe, but perhaps not enough to worry about. My general use computer draws ~17 W at idle (the screens obviously power save) and less than that if asleep.

You can probably add a nought onto that for my old machines, once you factor in a monitor etc. Modern machines will use less power, but greenhouse gasses will have been emitted during their manufacture. It is cheaper and probably greener to stick with what I have got.

GeoffF100 wrote:You can probably add a nought onto that for my old machines. Modern machines will use less power, but greenhouse gasses will have been emitted during their manufacture.

Even going back to Core 2 Duo era hardware you're looking at under 100W at idle - see https://uk.pcmag.com/editors-choice/322 ... tiplex-755. I appreciate the energy/pollution embedded in manufacture, but this is a £200 2nd hand machine from eBay that I've added ram and disk to, hardly cutting edge.

I am typing with a third generation i3 that I got from eBay for £49: HP 4300 SFF. I have also got an AOC I2080SW monitor and Logitech Z200 speakers running, I do not have any numbers, for the idle consumption though. That is just my Xubuntu machine.

GeoffF100 wrote:I am typing with a third generation i3 that I got from eBay for £49: HP 4300 SFF. I have also got an AOC I2080SW monitor and Logitech Z200 speakers running, I do not have any numbers, for the idle consumption though. That is just my Xubuntu machine.

You're probably not in that bad a place then.

An Optiplex 3010 with a 3rd gen i5 an SSD and a mechanical drive is somewhere in the 25-30 W region at idle in Windows.

https://www.cnet.com/products/aoc-value ... itor-19-5/ says the monitor is 19W which isn't bad (lower you run the brightness, likely the lower the power use) and the speakers will be negligible,

It is probably still about 50W all told to do nothing. It boots Xubuntu 20.04 in 8 seconds from a Kingston A400 SSD that I already had. Chrome loads almost instantaneously. Windows is more ponderous on my other machine, but I do not often use that. My Raspberry Pi 4B uses only about 5W IIRC, but that would only about halve the power consumption once the peripherals had been taken into account.

25 or so - you'd surely set the monitor to sleep when it is inactive.

I agree about boot/application load times. For me it's most beneficial in preserving application state (SSH connections, vM state, incognito tabs where I need to log in to the same service with multiple sets of credentials, that kind of thing). That can easily be several minutes of fiddling.

You guys probably know this, and it won't suit everybody but if you go to settings and account and then sign in with a local account rather than a windows account it will let you disable the log in screen. But then maybe you want to be signed in with a windows account?

This might help somebody, sometime.