Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!walt.cc.utexas.edu!sanjay
From: sanjay@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Sanjay Keshava)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Leaving computer equip. on (was: Monitor reliabilty)
Message-ID: <37393@ut-emx.uucp>
Date: 20 Sep 90 05:17:58 GMT
References: <1081@beguine.UUCP> <42@voa3.UUCP>
Sender: news@ut-emx.uucp
Reply-To: sanjay@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Sanjay Keshava)
Organization: UT Austin B-School, High-Tech Capitalism in the making
Lines: 41

In article <42@voa3.UUCP> ck@voa3.UUCP (Chris Kern) writes:
>You need to consider more than the cost of electricity in deciding 
>whether to keep monitors, or other computer equipment, powered up
>(assuming, of course, that keeping the equipment on does indeed
>increase the interval between failures).  You also need to consider
>the cost in lost employee productivity of computer downtime.  People
>are typically more expensive than the computer resources they use
>-- and much more expensive than the electricity consumed by their
>computers.
>
>-- 
>Chris Kern			     Voice of America, Washington, D.C.
>...uunet!voa3!ck					+1 202-619-2020


This is an interesting thread for a change.  When I worked at Xerox a
few years ago, a memo was circulated asking users to power-off their
personal workstations before going home.  Some figures were presented
to show the savings in electricity cost, and they weren't trivial.

However, I too wondered about the cost of increasing failures and lost
productivity, but in the 5 years I was there, my workstation failed
only once due to known problems with the Seagate 4051 hard disk
sticking, and I powered-off my workstation daily.  In fact, I
experienced a severe disk crash, which required reformatting, during
one of the few times I left the workstation on overnight.  This was
due to electricians accidently disturbing the power lines during
non-work hours.

The lost productivity often attributed to waiting 20 minutes for it to
boot every morning was discounted because most people take a few
minutes to get some coffee, return some calls, etc when they arrive in
the morning.


                                               Sanjay
                                               ->|<-
                             Student in the UT Graduate School of Business
DARPA: sanjay@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu            | Graduation Date:  TBD
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UUCP:  ...!ut-emx!ccwf.cc.utexas.edu!sanjay | Trojans, and Longhorns.