the fans draw a trivial amount of power, the biggest users are the hard drive and the cpu when at full speed and some cards like video. sleep will save a lot of power. also, remember that 200W is the maximum the supply is rated for, unless you've got all the nubus slots full of piggish cards, a big hard drive, a cdrom running and the floppy going you're not going to be drawing that much, probably closer to 100W than 200W.
while sleep does save some power, it doesn't make life that much easier on the power supply, cpu, or hardrive. the harddrive still has to spin back up which strains the power supply and drive, and the cpu goes from a very low clock rate or off to full speed going through about the same temperature cycle as going from off to on. sleep does save a lot of power, but is nearly identical to power cycling in terms of wear on the machine, mostly it saves the user time in booting and in getting back to where they were in applications, otherwise it is about like power off in terms of energy usage and machine wear (close to off in terms of power usage though not zero). just turn it off, or sleep it, these machines don't seem to suffer from power cycling in my experience, as long as it's not every 5 minutes. if you'll be using it again soon, leave it on, if you're done for several hours, turn it off. honest, it won't make enough difference in it's life expectancy to matter, and replacement machines are available any way, and you should be backing up your hard drive any way since they do fail, and a lot of other things can corrupt your' data short of complete drive failure. if you do want to save some power, you can also set a separate sleep time for the harddrive which is a big power user, and you can certainly turn the monitor off. unless you've got an lcd monitor, definitely, definitely turn the monitor off, they are far more sensitive to run time than to power cycling because of the high voltages and high power levels and usually use about the same amount of power as the cpu. turning down the brightness will not save that much energy on a crt monitor, most of the power goes into deflection and high voltage, and driving the cathodes which are driven the same regardless of brightness (being only slightly affected by the contrast), brightness is done by adjusting the voltage on a fairly static electrode that doesn't use much power anyway. also, unless you've got a newer monitor, sleeping it won't save any power, it just cuts the sync signals and only newer monitors are designed to sleep when that happens, on older monitors it won't save much power and might even be hard on the monitor, though not too terrible. just turn the monitor off, as long as it's not constantly on and off several times an hour. if you do turn off the cpu or monitor (or sleep it, it's nearly the same power wise), always, always wait a minute or two before turning them back on, rapid power cycling is very hard on all electronics, computer and other. Dick Johnson wrote: > > The cpu on my 7100/80 is listed at 200+ watts. That adds up to more than 5k > watts per day. I used to power it down with the Sleeper program when not in > use, which switched off the hd but still kept both cooling fans blowing. > > Question: How much wattage is saved in the sleep mode, if the circuitry is ------- -- 1st-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> 1st PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/1st-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> List archive: <http://mail.maclaunch.com/lists/1st-powermacs/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
