del ... huh ? If by chance you're saying that you get what you pay for ...
Yeah, you get what you pay for.
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CSY Man said …
Okay Troubledour.
I may take ya up on fixing stuff:
In a nut-shell: After I installed a stupid CD printer driver, to be able to make my 6 year old HP Laserjet 3100 printer work, the brand new PC refused to go into "sleeper" mode.
The printer driver interferes with the stand-by, or hibernation mode.
Been on e-mail with tech support for hours and hours, and finally gave up.....
Therefore...If I leave the machine running for the next 10 years, is that bad..?
Or if I shut it down and restart it every day for the next day, is that bad...?
Del:
Aye, ya don't have a Cat because it is too expensive...?
Hmm, more later on that one..
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First of all, your tech support experience is typical enough. Tech Support these days is handled in one of two or three ways, or a combination. Primarily, there’s free, “no cost”, support & fee for
service support.
Free support is, of course, very not cost free. It may not cost the end user anything directly but it is reflected in the cost of products. The techies have to be paid to sit there & make use of an infrastructure that also costs
money. For this reason, many manufacturers see tech support as pure overhead & mitigate costs ruthlessly. Their “technicians” are typically poorly paid
non technicians that are reading from a script. If your problem has been scripted, & if you’re lucky enough to find a way to work from the same page with someone that would otherwise be offering you fries at a drive through window, good for you, you’ve gotten lucky.
Another tech support scenario is fee for
service. In this scenario the tech support department becomes a potential profit center & is run as such … costs are even more closely scrutinized as attempts are made to keep
books in black ink & not red. Of course, it soon becomes glaringly obvious that
money isn’t directly made from quality tech support, it just isn’t. Fee for service attempts are often very short lived & fraught with difficulty pending a quiet dismantling.
Another option is a combination of both, some options are “free”, other options cost something per occurrence or for some defined period of time. In my own experience, this is typically even more frenetic than either of the two simpler options & just as poorly run.
I've only scuffed over the high spots, of course. Other complications include outsourcing tech support entirely, & even more baffling, outsourcing to overseas vendors ... whatever.
Bottom line, tech support can be worth an attempt, you might land in the scripted zone with a “techie” that isn’t a complete moron. However, when it looks like that hasn’t happened, banging away at that option will only make your
head hurt …
Having gotten that off my chest (ahhrrrrr), it’s time to move on.
20 yrs ago we powered down our computers because leaving them running burned up excessive power & prematurely burned out necessary items like fan & drive spindle bearings. Early EnergyStar features alleviated that somewhat, allowing us to automagically spin down drives & turn off monitors while leaving the machine up & running.
So, why leave them up & running ?
The most sensitive components of your computer are the printed circuits on various boards, primarily the main system board. Power on/off cycles are also thermal cycles that expand &
contract the printed circuits themselves, but often not the boards, they typically don't get hot enough to expand that mass. This disparate expansion/contraction cycle can often compromise thinly printed circuits.
The ideal scenario is one where the system is allowed to maintain a warm condition for components that benefit from it, while powering down components that can only suffer from continuous duty & unnecessarily cost you power as well. Even though circuits that aren't currently in use shouldn't get "hot", Sleep Mode seems to help extend the longevity of system boards & expansion cards. It will certainly reduce your power burn, so this is something worth pusuing.
If you can provide me with the following, I’ll do what I can to come up with a fix or workaround …
The Exact Name, Model & Series of the computer, including a
Serial Number & any available Service ID Number …
The Exact (correct) Operating System with Version Number & installed Service Pack, if any …
The Exact Name, Model & Series of Printer with any & all other numbers like the
Serial Number & Service ID type numbers …
The Print Driver Name, Version & Source that you’re currently using, and finally …
A description of the other peripherals attached to the system.
Note, I ask for serial numbers because they can identify mid-model changes that can cause difficulty & I ask for peripheral information because things like scanners and other IO port devices can wreak havoc with printers (like legacy (not USB) zip drives & cameras).
Troubledour
Linear Mode
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