Phil Plumbo wrote: > > Interesting column from Bob Metcalfe in Infoworld this week - his final one > for that trade rag. As he often does, this time he's asking leading > questions to try to get some discussion going, arguing for smarter use of > computer resources during apparent idle time, among them: > > "What is your computer doing those first minutes after you start it up? It's > been idle for hours. It will be idle for much of the time thereafter. So why > doesn't it handle its duties before or after starting up?" > > I've always been peeved at lengthy boot times, which leads me (and most I > know) to just leave the box on all the time (a waste). > > So I'm curious. How would we answer Bob's question for Linux? (Besides "um, > well... it was turned *off*, Bob"). Well, the simple answer for Metcalfe is that more systems should use some sort of sleep mode rather than actually shutting down. Laptops and portable systems have done this forever. My family has an old IBM PC Convertible that was almost never actually turned off -- it would just go to sleep when you hit the power button. Once in a while, you'd have to reboot it, but that was not very frequent (usually if the battery ran down when it was sleeping -- which took at least a few days). Today, that is how handhelds and other really small computers work. A Palm seems to start up instantly, but that's because it was already running. If you actually reset it, you'll see that it does have a boot-up process (though it still only takes a few seconds). This makes it easy to avoid having to predict the future. But if you can predict the future, the best option may be to set your system's wake-up timer. Most modern boxes with ATX power supplies allow you to set a time for the system to start up. I had a roommate that used to have his system start up at 7:00 AM (though he eventually just set it up to run continuously). -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Famous last words - You / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ and what army? \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org