Is Linux really faster than MS Windows ?

[Graham Campbell]

On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 13:35 -0800, Brian Mury wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-05-03 at 13:00 -0800, Michael wrote:
> > You really don't want to shutdown your computer that often anyway. 
> > Startup and shutdown are stressful on your hardware. The more you do it 
> > the higher your chance of something dying. 
> 
> As a colleague once said: "The only time my computer fails to turn on is
> after I've turned it off". :-)
> 
> > An example being that most 
> > computer's fans don't keep going after the computer is shutdown. During 
> > the time from when you shutdown, until the computer has naturally 
> > cooled, the insides of your computer are exposed to increased high 
> > tempertures.
> 
> Not really. As soon as the computer is turned off, the heat sources all
> disappear, so the temperature has nowhere to go but down.
> 
Not really. This is a dynamic situation with the heat being actively
removed and temps non-uniform. You change the heat flow patterns and the
temps will spike in some places.

I am an old-timer and remember the big old mainframes, especially the
CDC 6600 and CDC 7600. These were cooled with circulating refrigerant.
An undisciplined power outage definitely caused problems due to spiking
temps. CDC did a study that showed a dramatic increase in failures about
7 days (as I recall) after a power failure.

> Sure, I suppose the air temperature in the case might go up a bit as the
> hot components cool down, but I don't think it would be significant. Not
> to mention that leaving it on causes everything to stay hot forever,
> which isn't good for the hardware either.
> 
> I think you'll get more stress from power cycling because of voltage
> spikes, inrush current, etc.
> 
> While powering cycling causes stress, so does leaving it on. I suppose
> you would need to figure out how long it's going to be off and decide
> which is the lesser of two evils. Leaving it powered up for short
> stretches would be preferable to frequent power cycling, but turning it
> off would probably be better than leaving it on but unused for long
> periods.
> 
> With the reliability of modern hardware, I don't think either way poses
> a significant problem. I leave mine on for convenience.
> 
> 
-- 
Graham Campbell <gc1111 at optonline.net>