Nope. heh. In fact there was something about this a couple of weeks ago on slashdot where someone ran a statistic that most people uses google as a homepage but the white screen of google supposedly used up more energy and if the page was black it wouldn’t use up so much….which is a load of BS. It’s amazing the amount of crap people make up.”

This isn’t BS, in most cases it still takes more power to light up the monitor white than it does black, depends on the monitor size too. It doesn’t take THAT much power but it still takes a tiny bit more. Then again the switch from a CRT to a LCD is saving enough power anyhow.

As for components getting shocked with a sudden jolt of current when you turn on the machine, you shouldn’t worry too much about that. If the machine you are using was not cheaply made then all of the electrical components on the board should be rated at twice their normal working voltage. Besides when you watch power-up cycles on most machines there is very little overshoot in the voltage ramps.

You should always practice safe grounding habits to eliminate ESD discharge. You can potentially send 10kV of ESD into any component you are handling; this is much more likely to happen in more arid climates.

Turbo button, what the other guys said about slowing down and speeding up the CPU clock.

CD burn speed…you may see some corruption if you are using cheap CDs and or cheap burner.

Thermal shock has become a worse problem due to high operating temperature of equipments. Typically what happens is the temperature changes cause stress on the bondwires that connect the die to the packaging and can crack and form a weak or open circuit. It does happen but it’s not a big deal.

2. Screen savers are a throwback to the 80s, they have developed additives to the phosphors that largely have eliminated burn in. And of course LCDs never had this problem. This one isn’t really ‘BS’ since there was a time when monitors and televisions would burn it. It’s just not the case anymore

3. Electro-static discharge (ESD) is one of those things that can sneak up on you when you least expect it. Yes ESD is relatively rare. Yes static discharge will destroy all but a very few components specially designed to handle it (there is only so much you can do to protect upwards of 6000 volts). It’s one of those ‘why risk it?’ things. A $10 wrist strap and common sense is far cheaper then even the cheapest internal component.

4. Yes there is at least one Linux virus: Linux.RST.B.

5. Unless you are using very cheap media I see no reason to drop the speed. Anecdotal evidence I know but I have burnt upwards of 8000 CDs at full speed on a 24x CDR and in that time had probably 30 defective disks. If your burner is spitting out a lot of coasters then certainly drop down the speed, but if it isn’t why change something that works?

6. It reduced the clock multiplier and sometimes disabled the CPU cache.

Yes. Some programs used the CPU clockspeed for their speed settings. A good example is the original wing commander. Back then, the 33Mhrz computer dominated and was the only available CPU speed (it was an i386, ring a bell?). Well, because it was the only PC CPU, the developers of WC used that clock speed. If you then, down the road, upgraded your CPU beyond 33Mhrz, say to 66Mhrz, the whole game played at /twice/ the speed. The turbo button didn’t speed things up — it allowed you to slow your computer down by turning the clock speed back.

Well I would hope that your using suspend/sleep or hibernation instead of just a full power off. With suspend/sleep the computer is still on, it’s just that parts of the computer are powered down. With hibernation the computer is turned off but the contents of memory are saved to a file on the HD for a quick boot when you power back up.

Computers have come a long way since the old days. There really is no problem with powering on/off equipment. Laptops get powered on/off all the time and I still have tons of old Compaq P3 laptops from 1999/2000 that still work. The ones that don’t never failed because they were powered on/off too many times.

“Are screensavers necessary”?

Nope. heh. In fact there was something about this a couple of weeks ago on slashdot where someone ran a statistic that most people uses google as a homepage but the white screen of google supposedly used up more energy and if the page was black it wouldn’t use up so much….which is a load of BS. It’s amazing the amount of crap people make up.

“Do I really have to wear wrist-guards and take precautions against static when handling components?”

Well you don’t HAVE to do anything. Most environments you don’t build up enough static electricty in your body to affect electronic components but in some environments you do. A powerful enough charge is all it takes to fry a component. The precautions are there to protect against gradual ESD damage as well. You fix a computer today without taking precautions and perhaps cause a slight bit of damage….you work on the computer a few weeks later without taking precautions and BAM the hardware doesn’t work no more….

“Are there really no viruses for Linux?”

Define viruses. Most of the problems today with security are keyloggers/rootkits/spyware/malware. Not viruses. Linux isn’t really a target but it’s not an “enemy” or there’s no money in compromising it. In Windows there is.

“Do you really need to burn CDs slow?”
Depends on the media/cd burner. In the early days of CDRS there were ALOT of bad brands of CDS and CD burners. Nowadays it doesn’t really matter that much.

“Did the old ‘turbo’ button on old computers ever do anything?”

Well the turbo button on my Packard Bell 286 @8mhz was boosted up to 12mhz with the turbo button. I don’t remember seeing any difference though. I guess if you run some synthetic benchmarks you may see a difference or run some compression tests.