PC Pals Forum

Technical Help & Discussion => Self Building, Upgrading & General Hardware Help => Topic started by: Clive on November 10, 2002, 10:40

Title: Power Options
Post by: Clive on November 10, 2002, 10:40
What power options does everybody use?  I've just put mine up by a considerable amount to:


Monitor 2 hours

Turn off hard disks 5 hours

System standby 5 hours

The reason I ask is because my previous settings were 1hr/2hrs/2hrs.  I find that when the machine goes into hiberantion it hangs and won't come back to life again.  It won't turn off at the switch ( a common Windows problem I know) and I turned it off at the mains it refused to power up at all for about 5 minutes.  I don't know if this is a fail safe device.  Any comments would be appreciated.
Title: Re:Power Options
Post by: bat69 on November 10, 2002, 10:47
I'm afraid I'm not 'Green' when it comes to this, I turn it all off, screensavers and all. I've had so much software crash because of power functions, I gave up on them. ::)
Title: Re:Power Options
Post by: Mustapha Phagg on November 10, 2002, 11:06
never switch mine off (unless it crashes) but settings are:

Screen saver 7 min.
standby 20 min.
monitor 15 min
hard drives 3 hours.

Been running like that for about 3 years and the only recurring problem is on restart/shutdown, it always hangs on the win98 gui screen. More a pain in the a**e than a problem. ;D

Title: Re:Power Options
Post by: Adept on November 10, 2002, 11:07
I agree with Bat, Clive. Power management functions are mostly not worth the effort.

When my PC is on, it's usually being used for something ;)

The only power management option I do use regularly is "Standby", which I have linked to the Power Button.

Using standby allows my PC to boot up in about 10 seconds, rather than the usual 2 minutes of faffing around  8)
Title: Re:Power Options
Post by: bat69 on November 10, 2002, 11:09
I turned mine off Mustapha, got rid of all splash screens etc, but Win still crashes on me too, but its my unstable PC - needs reformatting and hitting with a hammer :o ::)
Title: Re:Power Options
Post by: Simon on November 10, 2002, 11:30
Yes, I've turned all my power management off as well.  I don't leave my PC unattended long enough to have to worry about it.  I do have my screen saver set for 10 minutes though, which usually only fires up if I'm doing a big download, or have a long running program on the go.

Always turn off your screen saver if you defrag!   :)
Title: Re:Power Options
Post by: Clive on November 10, 2002, 11:41
Oh! Right!  Thanks for all those tips.  I'll see how it goes with these settings and if I get any further problems I'll turn them off altogether.  I've never bothered with them on my wife's machine and she had not experienced any problems at all.