Disc analyser news update

Andrew Burton wrote: Surely you've heard of wake-on-LAN, and sleep/standby or even suspend/hibernate. Surely you've heard of power management, you know, spin down disks whenever possible, shut down the display after 10 minutes, sleep after 30 minutes, that sort of thing? I hear these things are available even for virus infectable and registry laden operating systems. These are generally considered solved problems at this point. If we're talking about a notebook, surely that's only a few watts - 85W for mine, as an example. I've seen some modern "gaming" desktops use 450W or even more, I could understand those being a problem, but a notebook? Myself, I use the notebook as the main machine, but I've also got a PPC Mac mini I use as a file server, plus another machine running openbsd as a router. Together, they both use less electricity than my fridge. Since the mini connects to its external drives over firewire, it can spin them down when they're not in use. It's possible this can be done over USB2, but I really prefer firewire over USB since it's closer to SCSI, and doesn't require hubs. Plus I've had bad luck with USB drives when connecting through hubs. At some point soon, if I find a nice small x86 box capable of running Solaris 10 properly, and not consume too much, I'll retire the mini and reformat its drives with ZFS. But for now it does the job very nicely. I do have some more hungry desktop/server class machines (Solaris SPARC, IBM Power, etc.), but I generally don't power them on unless I need them. There are of course the classic computers in the collection, but as I don't use them 24/7, they only get powered on when needed. Most don't consume too much as they're little 8 bit machines, but a couple are bit on the hefty side. Running an infectable operating system is a different problem, but one that has a very easy solution. :-) Mine takes less than 2 seconds to wake from sleep, and when it comes back online, everything is where I left it, ready to go, I don't have to relaunch any apps. Most of the time my ssh sessions are still there and connected. If not, RSA keys and screen make short work of that issue. Shutting down is far too inconvenient. If you add up all the time it takes to shut down, restart, relaunch everything every day, you'll find you're giving a significant chunk of your life in service to a machine which should be serving you instead. Life's too short to waste on such acrobatics. Old, or new, use the technology such that it works in your favor, not against it. Again, if running an OS that has a registry is problematic, that problem has a very easy solution. :)