03-08-2015, 09:48 AM
I must admit that I generally shut my Window 7 desktop machine properly, but that's because a power cut in "sleep" mode would be bad - when in sleep, data is held in RAM, and the computer needs to use a small amount of power to sustain that. On a laptop, no problem; I do that all the time. And most laptops will keep an eye on the battery state during sleep, and if it reaches a critical level, they wake up and put the computer into "hibernate" (where everything is RAM is saved to a temporary file on the HDD before shutting down completely. At start-up, the contents of this file is put back into RAM so that the machine can resume where it was).
My ancient XP machine in the workshop goes into sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. It resumes in about 5 seconds. But booting up from cold takes about 20 - slightly quicker than my W7 machine - so boot-up times aren't really a concern to me. I can easily spend a couple of minutes just wondering why I turned it on in the first place
I don't worry about power cuts while my XP machine is in sleep as it seems to be very good at sorting itself out. I'm sure the W7 machine would be just as good, but as the whole family use it, I prefer to play it safer with that machine. Because I use sleep with the XP machine, it has "uptimes" measured in months rather than hours. Not bad for a 14 year old OS running on 8 year old hardware
All my computers start faster than my HDD set-top box!
Still undecided about 10. I'm certainly not unhappy with XP or 7 - they both do what I need. I also use 98 on occasion. And Ubuntu for server things. I might trial it by doing a clean install of W7 onto a spare HDD, and allow that to upgrade to 10... But not for a few weeks - just too busy.
My ancient XP machine in the workshop goes into sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. It resumes in about 5 seconds. But booting up from cold takes about 20 - slightly quicker than my W7 machine - so boot-up times aren't really a concern to me. I can easily spend a couple of minutes just wondering why I turned it on in the first place
I don't worry about power cuts while my XP machine is in sleep as it seems to be very good at sorting itself out. I'm sure the W7 machine would be just as good, but as the whole family use it, I prefer to play it safer with that machine. Because I use sleep with the XP machine, it has "uptimes" measured in months rather than hours. Not bad for a 14 year old OS running on 8 year old hardware
All my computers start faster than my HDD set-top box!
Still undecided about 10. I'm certainly not unhappy with XP or 7 - they both do what I need. I also use 98 on occasion. And Ubuntu for server things. I might trial it by doing a clean install of W7 onto a spare HDD, and allow that to upgrade to 10... But not for a few weeks - just too busy.
