Surely it must make a difference if you have a standard hard drive or a solid state drive.
Whats the percentage of solid state drives out there?
Have you restarted your computer this week?
261–270 of 411 posts
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#262I shut down my desktop every night. No reason to keep it on. I can save my work, all my tabs persist, it’s fine. My main complaint is that my PC seems to have crazy clock drift? And windows just doesn’t seem to care? It doesn’t actually cause problems but I will check and see that it’s off by >5 seconds and that just shouldn’t ever happen. My phone is always accurate to <0.05s and same in Linux. Idk why windows isn’t…
Replace the CMOS battery yet?
I'm confident this will mostly fix my problem but its such a minor thing its not worth disassembling my PC for. But I will likely swap it out next time I disassemble it for any other reason.
It seems to me like this problem can be entirely solved in software if the OS more frequently resynced the clock. I checked just now and it last did a sync 2 days ago? I dont think my PC bios even saves sub-second accuracy, and IMO it should be resyncing after every boot.
The CMOS battery on my ~10yr old linux laptop is also dead, and its a complete non-issue there. The bios complains occasionally and shows me the time is wrong and then i boot in and the OS fixes the clock immediately.
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still remember reaching into my backpack to retrieve my Macbook in sleep mode only to find it hot to the touch, having woken up for some goddamn stupid reason. We had "proper" sleep decades ago: we called it "hibernate". Modern "smart sleep" is a technological regression, and Apple is as big an offender as any.
Sure. Do you shut off your phone every time you put it in your pocket?
I leave my phone off for most of the day, and 100% of the time that it's on it's in battery saver mode. In any case, it's an irrelevant comparison, because a phone's thermals have nothing in common with a laptop's thermals.
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#264Surely it must make a difference if you have a standard hard drive or a solid state drive. Whats the percentage of solid state drives out there?
Why?
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#265I have a cron job which restarts my computer every day (Linux Mint Debian edition). I like waking up to a "fresh" computer, and since I know that it will restart every day - this is a "forcing function" to (1) be diligent about saving things that are important, (2) treating browser tabs, random notes, etc as ephemeral, and bookmarking the important stuff. I used to work at an office where we pair-programmed with clie…
Regarding browser tabs you can always just reopen Chrome and press control shift T to get your previous tabs even after a restart
Indeed! You can even configure it to open the last set of open browser tabs as per default, saving you a `ctrl+shift+T`.
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
On phones malware is more restrained by the sandboxing. But now the reboot isn't necessary in the first place.
Exploits break out of the sandbox for higher system access. Rebooting flushes them out because the exploits have abused some memory bug to load custom code in the system, but this can not persist a reboot since everything gets cyrptographically verified on boot. This is why things like the Nintendo Switch hacks and iphone jailbreaks have to be reloaded every time the system reboots, while they could modify the system…
> This is why things like the Nintendo Switch hacks and iphone jailbreaks have to be reloaded every time the system reboots,
Why is it this particular form of 'malware protection' always seems to involve a 30% fee?
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#267I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.
I remember my good old PC with Windows around 2005. It wanted to reboot all the time and got stuck in an infinite updating cycle every time I did. It was a particularly lazy computer.
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No reason to keep it on. any reason not to simply let it sleep?
Not OP, but the sleep and hibernate states on my desktop are pretty finicky and can't truly be trusted. I'd rather know everything shut down properly than risk it, especially since the thing boots in seconds anyway, and I have to input the encryption password anyway.
Yeah, i just simply don't trust the sleep functionality to not be buggy. I walk away with processes running a decent amount of the time and its unclear to me what things can prevent sleep from triggering and what cant.
If i do need to have something persist overnight I use hibernate. And I haven't encountered issues with that. But ive had enough issues with sleep states on my laptops that i just dont bother on my desktop. The monitor goes to sleep if i walk away but the PC doesn't sleep.
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#269One of our customers has a daily automated restart for their servers. This is because the IT people have long lost track of what the system actually does, and feel they have no time to figure it out. It is the bane of my existence when it comes to the predictability of uptime, not to mention long-term processes getting interrupted over the day boundary.
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/firing-the-right-custome...
...among many others. If you're too dependent upon them that you can't, that's a whole other problem, one that needs to be fixed anyway.
Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your model of open/closed is incomplete and thus misleading. There are more states to a process than "active" and "inactive," and it is not optimal for the system to simply move processes between those two gross states. The obvious example is non-foreground apps during multitasking. A less obvious example is an app during a background refresh. "Fully closing" a process is not necessarily cleaner than letting…
I think my point is that minimizing the process doesn't free the ram it's using. Closing it, even if it stays running in the background, should free up resources
That's what swap is for.