Okay, never thought much about it but I'm just curious about the "Power Option Properties". Power schemes, monitor, hard disks and system standby. There's also the "Hibernation" for the system.

Question is it really important to do this to our pc? I'm not cheap or anything but I'll be glad to save up some power and money and be kind to our environment at the same time.



I'm very curious about the "Turn off hard disks:" feature. I have an idea that it will stop working at given amount of time, like turn off after 10 minutes or whatever. But is it good for the hard drive to turn off and on like that as to compare to just spins 10K rpm the whole time? Is this feature going to extend the life span of the hard drive or worst?



For the "Power Schemes" there are many selections but which one is the best for the pc, generally if you want to minimize power consumption. Hey, if I could save $5 of my monthly electric bill that would be great. Already spending too much for gas here.



And lasty, to hibernate or not to hibernate, that is the question.



Thanks for your time.

Don't know much about all the other power save features, but here's a thought:

My PC Power Consumption:

Idle: 145W
Off: 10-11W
Standby: 12W
Boot: 163W

My suggestion:

I'd say standby is a much better feature over Hibernate, especially if you use your PC throughout the day because the constant booting from your HDDs cause wear and tear on them and also drain more power...

My System:

TT Silent Power 480W
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ T-bred - Stock
2 x 512Mb RAM Corsair XMS C2PT
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe MB
256Mb FX5700 GPU
2 x 80Gb WD800JD SATA HDDs (RAID 0)
Hyundai L90D+ 19in Monitor (left on during my "tests" )

About the harddrive wearing out. I know that the harddrive on my compaq cheap computer at my house has had the harddrive turn off after 10 mins of not using it for the past three years. Its still running fine. However on my computer right now that uses about 300 watts during a load (which is all the time bc its folding 24/7) it costs about 30ish bucks a month to run it. I know this because when i came home for xmas break the bill went up 30 bucks and the only difference was my computer being on. I an not allowed to leave it on at home anymore.

If you uses your computer a few times a day i would suggest stand by.

I've also noticed that the HDD Power Down feature can slow down a PC sometimes.... for some reason, during gameplay, when I had a SATA drive and an IDE drive, my game would pause for a couple seconds as the HDD powered down and back up again. I'm assuming that the disk monitoring feature or something caused this because my pagefile was NOT set for that disk....