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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (3793)	11/29/1998 3:04:00 PM
From: mr.mark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

"Now if I can only figure out a way to stay connected to my ISP. I can not even compose a mid size post without GTE disconnecting me for inactivity." i'm sure you know this already, but just in case....your ISP can adjust the connect time for your account. right now it may be set very low. one of my ISP's has, for instance, a 3-20 minute connect time range. (another issue altogether is the "session time". it is my understanding that most ISP's allow 5 hours of continuous connectivity, then the session time has to be reset, i.e., reconnected. i was able to get one ISP to extend the session time to 8 hours for me.) but back to the inactivity disconnect issue, again, i'm sure that you already know this, or tried it, but why not leave a program like mIRC running in the background to fool the ISP into thinking you are active? fwiw, mark

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (3793)	11/29/1998 7:49:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14778

As usual, ZP, you ask 100 questions in two sentences <g>. I like that -- matches my outlook. >> I don't worry about the juice. I am mostly concerned with extending component life. I don't worry about juice either, particularly, but I do have a problem with heat, so I think about these things. The monitors produce the most heat, by far, so I shut them down. My 21" is on a Matrox millenium which, for the life of me, I can't get to go into power saver mode in NT (it did under Win 95). Since it's easy to push the off button, I have not pursued this aggressively. My 17" on an ATI card goes nicely into power-saver mode, but what the heck -- push one button, push two. I just can't justify shutting the disks down for heat reasons, and old disks humping along without a break for over 6 years now, plus various backup strategies, plus the fact that the oldest and humpiest are still chugging along since 1992 with no more than a few weeks' respite altogether (and then only when I was out of town for several weeks at a time), all lead me to the philosophy that these guys should, to borrow a phrase, work for ME. The spin-up I referred to is on my wife's PC where I keep our mirrored disks and therefore the critical stuff (yep, my wife's PC runs NT server. The best compromise -- she doesn't care WHAT it runs and I don't have to screw around with Server too often <ggg>). In truth, it's down in the noise too, for me, because I only access it two or three times a day and I KNOW why it takes 20 seconds. My wife makes more noise, which may make me go change it eventually. But then I'd have to figure out how to do it again. BTW, toning down the brightness doesn't do much for the heat, though it probably does help the life quite a bit. If my monitor would go into power saver mode realiably I would let it do it. Beyond that, I admit the off/on is probably not the best thing for the monitor. Still, TVs do it for years, so I'm not going to get bent out of shape over it. The switching UPSs switch on a voltage sag that sags enough. I forget the specs, but they're in the APC manual. PC tolerance for sags is pretty high, though. It's spikes and surges that do them in. I've never had a (known) problem with this, so I intend to continue in my blythe what-me-worry mode on that issue. Company owned monitors help with this attitude, I expect <gg>. To keep your ISP in shape, get Quote Tracker from Jerry Medved ($25) and set it to a 5 minute refresh interval (or whatever keeps 'em hopping). Works wonders. medved.net You can get sensors which sense motion and/or body heat to keep the lights on while you're in the room and turn them off when you leave after 20-30 minutes or so. My company's corporate offices have them. They work well, though I sometimes find myself in the dark during periods of deep slee .. thought. This is true with the lights on also, however <g>. Spots