Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
Only reason we turn our main PCs off each night is to conserve electricity (like the good people we are  )
One stays on cos that's connected to our seismometer, and the router stays on (despite it not being in use when the main ones are switched off ) |
I have gone through a huge flap about turning PCs off at night. I work in computer management for the US Army in the Pacific Theatre and we would like all PCs to stay running in order to be able to push security upgrades to them during the night. That insures that the latest upgrades are installed without impacting the workflow of the users. The electrical power folks want to shut them all down to conserve power.
We have done many studies on power usage, and if you leave the PCs and monitors on at full power, they use a lot. With the tens of thousands of PCs we have it can amount to a pretty hefty electric bill; several millions of dollars per year.
BUT! if you set the power settings to turn off the monitor, and put the PC into standby, the power usage is minimal, and the loss of productivity it takes to install patches during the day more than makes up for it.
Unfortunately, we still haven’t convinced the General; so we shut them all down, and users have to wait for the patches to get installed when they start them up in the morning.
Yes, I know, we could solve it with "Wake on LAN", but the security guys won't let us.