Why is the ATX PSU designed to standby current?

[Alan Liefting]

I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the
wake on LAN feature.


Alan Liefting

 

[Ken Taylor]

"Alan Liefting" <ALiefting@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message
news:420ABCDC.4070309@ihug.co.nz...

I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the wake
on LAN feature.


Alan Liefting

How will it do wake-on-anything without drawing power? You could turn it

"Off" if you didn't want to draw any power. And why is it the government's
problem that you can't be bothered reaching for the power switch?

Ken

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 14:47:47 +1300, "Ken Taylor" <ken123@xtra.co.nz>
wrote:

"Alan Liefting" <ALiefting@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message
news:420ABCDC.4070309@ihug.co.nz...
I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the wake
on LAN feature.


Alan Liefting

How will it do wake-on-anything without drawing power? You could turn it
"Off" if you didn't want to draw any power. And why is it the government's
problem that you can't be bothered reaching for the power switch?

My new Dells don't have power switches, just the annoying soft-power
button on the front panel. Worse, they don't have reset buttons.
Luckily, I use a UPS that *does* have a real power switch on the
front.

John

 

[Joel Kolstad]

"Alan Liefting" <ALiefting@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message
news:420ABCDC.4070309@ihug.co.nz...

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the wake
on LAN feature.

There's a lot more than that. The typical PC also supports wake on modem
(ring), wake on USB device interrupt (e.g., mouse moved), and wake on
keyboard.

The whole standby power idea was specifically aimed at getting people to
stop leaving their _entire_ computer running just so that they wouldn't have
to wait for it to reboot. Standby typically uses more than an order of
magnitude less power than active usage does, so it's a significant
improvement.

---Joel

 

[Guy Macon]

Alan Liefting wrote:

I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off.

There is this new invention called an "outlet strip" that allows
you to cut the power to your monitor, computer, printer, etc. all
with a single switch. Some of them even have built-in surge
suppressors and interference filters.

I am a bit of an environmentalist and I find it rather lax of
govt agencies to allow this blatent waste of what collectively
is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

Funny how "environmentalist" always seems to equal "he who
calls for increased government power and decreased liberty"...

Look here for some eye-opening information:

http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

http://www.john-daly.com/

 

[Keith Williams]

In article <QYEOd.387$1S4.27236@news.xtra.co.nz>, ken@home.nz says...

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highSNIPlandTHIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote in
message news:tlfl01h0761e3ab5jdoiegf25vruit0lkd@4ax.com...
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 14:47:47 +1300, "Ken Taylor" <ken123@xtra.co.nz
wrote:

"Alan Liefting" <ALiefting@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message
news:420ABCDC.4070309@ihug.co.nz...
I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow
this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the
wake
on LAN feature.


Alan Liefting

How will it do wake-on-anything without drawing power? You could turn it
"Off" if you didn't want to draw any power. And why is it the
government's
problem that you can't be bothered reaching for the power switch?



My new Dells don't have power switches, just the annoying soft-power
button on the front panel. Worse, they don't have reset buttons.
Luckily, I use a UPS that *does* have a real power switch on the
front.

John

How the hell do you run Windoze without a reset switch??

Laying on the power switch to four seconds will shut down an ATX supply
(at least that's what the spec says). It's just a slower reset. ;-)

I run my PC's on a UPS too, leave them on basically all the time. For the
environmentally conscious, I figure that it's better to sue a couple of
watts more rather than suffer the wear and tear on components leading to
earlier failure and more rubbish. (It's my rationalization, I'll try if I
want to....)

Like everything there is a trade-off point. Cycling a PeeCee isn't all
that hard on it. I generally power them on once a day. Once on they
stay on. Though the reason I do so is more boot time than
reliability/cost/power.

--
Keith

 

[Guy Macon]

John Larkin wrote:

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

My copy of Windows (Windows 2000 Server) has a suspend to disk feature.
It doesn't work on my motherboard - probably something to do with the
quad proceesors or the dual hotswap power supplies - but it's there.

 

[nospam]

Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

It does, but it takes more than 2 seconds (takes perhaps 30 seconds on
this laptop). ...longer to restore. There is more to hibernation than
copying RAM to disk.

I wish I had disk drives which could restore 1GB of ram in 2 seconds.

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:47:41 +0000, nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid>
wrote:

Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

It does, but it takes more than 2 seconds (takes perhaps 30 seconds on
this laptop). ...longer to restore. There is more to hibernation than
copying RAM to disk.

I wish I had disk drives which could restore 1GB of ram in 2 seconds.

I wish I has an OS that didn't need a gig of ram.

John

 

[nospam]

John Larkin <jjlarkin@highSNIPlandTHIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:47:41 +0000, nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid
wrote:

Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

It does, but it takes more than 2 seconds (takes perhaps 30 seconds on
this laptop). ...longer to restore. There is more to hibernation than
copying RAM to disk.

I wish I had disk drives which could restore 1GB of ram in 2 seconds.


I wish I has an OS that didn't need a gig of ram.

Most of the time 3/4 of it is used to speed up the disk drives.

 

[Andreas Hadler]

John Larkin <jjSNIPlarkin@highTHISlandPLEASEtechnology.XXX> wrote:

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

How do you plan to restart the actual state of the hardware?
You'll need a lot of driver intelligence to restore all register
settings - some settings even could make no sense on a different time.

Andreas
--
It's not the things you don't know what gets you into trouble. It's
the things you do know that just ain't so.
- Will Rogers

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christense]

Alan Liefting <ALiefting@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message news:<420ABCDC.4070309@ihug.co.nz>...

I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the
wake on LAN feature.


Alan Liefting

If you live in a place that needs heating most of the year, does
it really matter?

-Lasse

 

[Winfield Hill]

John Larkin wrote...

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

It does. It's called hibernate mode, and the problem is that much
of the RAM contents have to be written to disk. For example, I have
1G of ram, and when I command a hibernate it usually has to save
several hundred MB of memory to the hard drive, perhaps even 500MB
or so, and this takes time. And it has to restore this at wakeup.

If you have a fast 10MB/sec drive, it takes 50s to restore 500MB.
It might even need 100s when writing, for a read-after-write check?
There may also be performance hits from disk fragmentation issues.

I'm not sure, but it seems Windows also wastes more time attempting
to optimize the amount of RAM stored by requesting program action.
There appear to be some timeouts while it waits for responses that
don't come. And there are similar excess delays upon resume.


--
Thanks,
- Win

 

[Pooh Bear]

Alan Liefting wrote:

I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the
wake on LAN feature.

It also works the on/off switch too such as may be found on the front panel
or even the keyboard and various other 'wake-on' features. Most monitors
also go into auto-standby when the PC is switched off too now as well.

No different to switching off your VCR / DVD / TV / some audio gear etc etc
using the remote control.

There are regulations that set maximum power draw limits in this sleep mode.



Graham

 

[Ian Stirling]

Lasse Langwadt Christensen <langwadt@ieee.org> wrote:

Alan Liefting <ALiefting@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message news:<420ABCDC.4070309@ihug.co.nz>...
I am mystified as to why the ATX PSU was designed so that it draws
standby current even while the PC is off. I am a bit of an
environmentalist and I find it rather lax of govt agencies to allow this
blatent waste of what collectively is a whole stack of CO2 emssions.

The only advantage of the current (!!) ATX power supply design is the
wake on LAN feature.

If you live in a place that needs heating most of the year, does
it really matter?

Gas is often a third of the price of electricity.
So, it can be an expense. (

 

[Keith Williams]

In article <af7n01tk81ktjmdupem6vm56o8et8i8mda@4ax.com>,
nospam@nospam.invalid says...

Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:

Why doesn't Windows suspend to disk? Just copy all of ram to disk and
*fully* shut down, zero power. Restart would take about 2 seconds;
spin up the disk, restore RAM, run.

It does, but it takes more than 2 seconds (takes perhaps 30 seconds on
this laptop). ...longer to restore. There is more to hibernation than
copying RAM to disk.

I wish I had disk drives which could restore 1GB of ram in 2 seconds.

Particularly a laptop drive. ;-)

It's not two seconds. I timed it yesterday. While in a meeting I had
to change batteries, so did a hibernate instead of powering down. It
was close to 45 seconds to hibernate and a bit over a minute to come
back. The laptop has 512MB.

--
Keith

 

[Joel Kolstad]

"Ian Stirling" <root@mauve.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:420c9f71$0$29411$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...

Gas is often a third of the price of electricity.
So, it can be an expense. (

If you have the option. In many places in the US apartment complexes are
built with electric heat because it's cheaper for the bulider and more
reliable (or at least cheaper to fix). :-(

 

[Guy Macon]

Carl D. Smith wrote:

One think to be aware of is that if you use suspend to ram, and
there is a power outage, you will lose your unsaved work just
like if the power went off when you were using the computer. But
there is one trick that minimizes the chance of this happening.
You can go into the power options and set a time for the system
to go into suspend to ram (standby), and a longer time for it to
go into suspend to disk (hibernate). The system should go into
suspend to ram, then when the suspend to disk time happens, it
should automatically wake up, and then suspend to disk. You get
the advantage of a 5 second wakeup if you restart the system
soon, and have less chance of losing stuff if you forget the
system in suspend to ram for a long period of time.

What I have not seen in Windows is the ability to suspend to ram
*and* to disk, with restore from ram if there was no power outage
and restore from disk if there was.