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85 Comments
- rsteinke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+43Okay, here's the thing. Being a Windows and Linux man, I know people are going to bitch about Windows. I'm cool with it, because I know that their's a time and a place for each. Linux is a totally kick ass server and general work environment. It's also great for programming. It lacks, in many cases, support directly from hardware vendors and the largest chunk of windows software, games. Yes, I realise you could download Cedega, but after jumping through hoops too many times to count with friends who are using Cedega to game I honestly don't see the point. Honestly you're going to run into two types of people: Casual Linux users who know where it belongs and what it can do, and hardcore zealots who ***** their own asses with wooden spoons and make all kinds of dark pacts with satan to get WoW to run just so they can laugh at Windows users.
Sometimes IT professionals just want to know what's asking them to reboot on a system, mabie they're a user who's checking out a new piece of hardware or software and they want to se what it's going to change so they can clean up afterwards (windows rollback doesn't work for *****, I've tried it and it sucks). Running Linux and bashing Windows might work for you, but it's not how the majority of the world works. Accept that and we'll all get along better. - pebecker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Reminds me of PendMoves: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/pendmoves.html
- Madh2orat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"Surely you only reboot after an OS update?"
You dont use windows do you? - lineman60, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6cool, saw the title and thought "becouse it's windows"
- dragulaaeop, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Linux is the reason why there is global warming... all you damn people never turning your computers off at night when they are not in use (you do sleep, right?) Seriously, stable or not, a home system isn't required to be on 24/7. @ dillitante: did you leave the house for more than a day at all during those 430 days? No bashing; honest question. Just wondering if you did then what was the point of keeping your computer on? I am sure that everyone would be happy to see their electric bill a bit smaller.
Linux as great as it is stable, but until recently it wasn't the most user-friendly operating system for Grandma, with the command line and all. Windows is somewhat unstable at times, but I think that is mainly due to user-error. Linux is more resilient, but I have crashed it a few times (several years back when I didn't know what the hell I was doing), but windows, which is my main os, I have fairly little trouble with. Plus, come on, all the 'free' games for windows, which is 'free' itself, gives one enough reason to slam down $40 or more a month for some broadband access
*Please note: the tone of the first paragraph was sligthly joking/somewhat serious. I don't really attribute global warming to computers that never sleep, but I bet they are not helping the problem either.
~dragula aeop - inactive, on 11/04/2008, -0/+2Some nice comments here.
"Oh hey I'm cool because my computer stays on for 30490 days without ever needing a single reboot!"
TURN YOUR PC OFF. Don't set your IRC status to afk or your IM's to Away mode, TURN THE DAMN PC OFF. NOT SLEEP, OFF.
Maybe you haven't rebooted your Linux machine because it's a pain in the ass for you to type "shutdown -r now"? Just a thought.
+3 for dragulaaeop and rsteinke. - Chris_F, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Prove me wrong, I would love it if you could.
- sung, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i'm not talking really about this article. i'm just wondering if anyone had submitted a link to a program with a virus in it. has that ever happened on digg? or is there anything that filters stories like that on here? whenever i download a program, i usually scan it with a anti-virus program, but i know there are people that'll just install it right away.
- GrahamStw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Switch off your PCs!!
My XP box takes roughly ten seconds to boot. Is that really such a big issue? I just have another sip of my coffee. If you leave it on all the time for no reason then you are effectively using your PC as a very inefficient room heater.
"[if left switched on..] a typical home setup for a PC Pro reader (two PCs, one 19in CRT, one TFT and a shared inkjet) will cost nearly £250 [about 440 USD] per year alone. Even if you switch to standby, the cost is likely to be well over £100."
-- from http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/71029/electric-shock.html - PoconoPCDoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sorry ritilford - rebooting will always bring out the topic of which OS needs the fewest reboots. I like GrahamStw's comment - let's be a little more concerned with wasting finite resources and switch the PC off! Long uptime is required by servers, but PC's should be switched off, IMHO. Think Globally - act locally....
- rsteinke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Arramol: Out of curiosity, do you have any work applications on the Windows box or do you do everything on the Linux laptop? I only ask because separating out work and play like that is a brilliant strategy if you're kinda ADD.......Like me.
- Chris_F, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@otomo-
Not only is it a bad OS, but it's developed by a bad company.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but any company that cares more about DRM (see Vista) and creating their own closed standards (ex. DirectX, and many, many more) for the purpose of monopolizing the software industry (~80 - 95% of PC's run a Windows operating system) and less about the average users is just evil. - rsteinke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1bman: I'll give Microsoft that, they improve each OS usually pretty substantially with each major revision. I think the two gripes people have are frequent reboots and a slow patch process for some problems. The first they're fixing in Vista from what I understand, I can't remember exactly how they explained it but it sounded like OS/2 where the system used to quit itself and suddenly reappear after a crash. Apparently, they're going to do something where the kernel is modular and a patch only has to restart that module not the whole kernel. What I'm waiting to see is how extensively the system has to 'restart' based on how many 'fixes' are released in each patch cycle.
I can only imagine reinstalling the system won't require a reboot to do windows update, but will render the system unuseable for at least an hour.
The slow patch process could be fixed if they'd stop developing components of the OS separately and then kludging them together. I don't know how much that's improved over the years, but I've got a friend in Redmond (a Gentoo user nonetheless) who's working on Vista installer code.....I should drop him a line. - rsteinke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sung: if your Virus scan is active and up to date and your spyware scanner is too you should be fine. Mcafee has saved my ass numerous times and the MS spyware scanner is surprisingly dilligent.
- leboff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1that .. is .. excellent
- inactivist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oops, typo in previous post.
Here's the fix
http://www.exodus-dev.com/products/WhyReboot/whyreboot1.0.0.500.zip
Cheers again,
Mike - MikeCampo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've always wanted to know why I needed to reboot. Nice find.
- DigeratiPrime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1ill try this out next time i go to reboot.
direct download
http://www.exodus-dev.com/products/downloads/direct2.asp - rsteinke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Otomo:
1. Windows is not a server environment
2. Yeah, I'll give you that.
3. What are you honestly doing that needs eel's ass security? If you're that paranoid either stop surfing the pr0n sites and downloading warez or install some extra security. At the user level Windows doesn't run anything that needs securing like Apache or SSH, and out of the box you should iptables firewall your linux box anyway. Yes, I agree with the law of least privelage, it is your job as the owner of the computer to ensure that security regardless of what environment you're running. I'm not flaming, I'm just saying on the one hand not everyone practices common sense/safe computing and on the OTHER hand, you're obviously technically inclined and you obviously practice safe computing, you're obviously up on the errata, why are you this worried about the kernel level security?
Just thinking out loud. - inactivist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hey, thanks for the link! :D
I'm the author of WhyReboot, so -- I have to say, I was not expecting all the traffic over the last few days. I had to take my offical download page offline for a bit because I thought we were being hit with a minor DDOS attack.. heh.
Please don't use Direct2.asp to download, if you wanna download it w/o jumping thru hoops, just go here:
http://www.exodus-dev.com/products/WhyReboot/whreboot1.0.0.500.zip
Thanks, all. Let me know what you like/don't like about the product, I'll work on improving it if I get enough 'constructive' requests.
Laters... - inactivist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oh, and I banged out WhyReboot because I have no choice but to deal with Windoze systems, and some of mine are older machines with SCSI cards, and rebooting takes too damn long, and - frankly, I hate moronic Installer software (and installer writers) who think nothing of requiring a reboot when they have done *nothing* more complicated than copying a helpfile (see WhyReboot page for my reasons, if you haven't already.)
Ok, enough of that, I'm going back to work now. - monkeyboy8686, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Looks handy.
- BenStockwell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Maybe you haven't rebooted your Linux machine because it's a pain in the ass for you to type "shutdown -r now"? Just a thought."
It's actually "halt" to shutdown, but generally I have no need to power down my Linux boxes. - inactivist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Just because I don't want to reboot doesn't mean I leave the power on - I put the systems into hibernation when I am not using them...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Why put the system into hibernation? Are you running that many programs that it becomes a burden to start them up when you need them?
- faredo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"inactivist"
The link http://www.exodus-dev.com/products/downloads/direct2_dl.asp which is displayed after the license agreement in the download section of the site, sends the exe file directly. - odysseus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ssbfalcon: Nothing, as long as cookies are used for authentication or to remember preferences. But to download a file?
- emer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0and for all you fools that say "Get a mac/run linux" (By the way I do run ubuntu linux) don't forget about the business world. Ever tried running a database client on a mac.... probably not since your pretty much limited to FileMakerPro, which isn't much more than just a front end.
- odysseus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Looks like a cool program, but did anyone else get the following upon execute?
- Illegal instruction in NTVDM application
Is it supposed to be only a 32KB file?
It's also lame that the site requires cookies to download. - rtilford, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I just leave my mac mini on all the time, and shutdown my xp machines when i am not using them.
- SsbFalcon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And what's wrong with cookies?
- rothbart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0odysseus:
Yes, I got the same error. Not useful to me at this point (may be a problem unrelated to their program though, who knows... this IS Windows we're talking about).
--rothbart - secion8, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0reasons to keep an home pc running at night is to run nightly maintenance routines. If you run nightly maintenance you may find that your suystem actually runs much better and stable.
- emer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Handy tool for removing malware that insists on reinstalling itself after reboot.
Good digg - mailman-zero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0One good reason I run Linux on my workstation and leave it on all night: Bittorrent.
- VesperDEM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"good point... get a Mac"
Why does every story on digg become a Mac vrs. Windows debate!
For your information tsupersonic, I haven't rebooted my Windows system in 25 1/2 days (as of this moment). Would have been much longer had it not been for a power glitch. - inactivist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Direct downloads: Please visit http://www.exodus-dev.com/products/downloads/direct2.asp and read the info there. I've told the entire sordid tale. Mea culpa!
- Galileo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Nobody needs to reboot:
9:50am up 256 days, 6:34, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 - GrahamStw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Thank you PoconoPCDoctor, I'm glad someone got my point.
Also from the PC Pro article: "..for each kilowatt-hour consumed, around 620g of CO2 gets dumped into the atmosphere... ..a Pentium 4 PC left on all the time crunching through SETI@home work units is directly responsible for placing almost a ton of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year."
Do members of the "never switch off" gang also leave their cars running on the drive to save that annoying ignition time?
Re: the original post - yeah quite good, but essentially the same as the SysInternals stuff mentioned. - MrDan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have an uptime of 33 minutes, do I win the prize?
- brhad56, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I had to reboot Linux 3 times yesterday. I was trying to setup my gamepad for ZSNES, and it just froze and I couldn't do anything and had to reboot. Switching USB ports the gamepad was plugged in seemed to resolve the problem. My point is, people who advertise a Desktop Linux never needs to be restarted are wrong.
- HitLines, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"We have corrected some issues with product downloads using certain versions of Netscape Navigator 7. If you have been having problems, please try again and let us know if problems persist."
I know some sites are coded poorly and don't display well in gecko browsers but downloads not working? Just link to the file and use stats to track.
Start > Run > cmd > systeminfo
:: Begin the uptime war ::
29 Days, 7 Hours, 3 Minutes, 46 Seconds - SsbFalcon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I still don't see why people pride themselves over not rebooting their machines... Sure, my linux partition never needs to reboot even after a new ati driver install or app install, but I still turn the machine off when I'm done. I'm not one to support LIPA (Long island Power Association, for those who don't live in LI NY...) more than I have to. The only problem is deciding how to actually shutdown. Click the shutdown computer button in the menu or type shutdown now...
For windows, rebooting isn't too bad if you modified the way it runs. My startup is pretty fast now, beating my linux restart into a working KDE (less time for Enlightnement) desktop by a couple seconds. Problem is I have to reapply the tweeks every so often as the startup (yes, the black screen part, and logon screen) gets sluggish after a while... - senfo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Why reboot?"
That's an easy one. Because you're running Windows! - SephirothAlpha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Good Utility.
Now why shouldnt it be part of the msconfig tool or something.
Dugg - GrahamStw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hibernation is good if that works for you. On my home system I find the difference between a cold start and coming out of hibernation is pretty marginal, so I prefer to start with a clean boot.
By the way, it's worth turning your PC and peripherals off at the wall as they still needlessly draw power even when they are 'off'. - Reference, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I need to enable cookies just to download this? Nope.
Also, you uptime junkies are hilarious. Stupid but hilarious. - oringo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0hitlines,
You know it's true that on average Windows reboots way more often than Linux. It's a known fact. There's no point in having an uptime war. Linux OS don't reboot unless you are updating the kernel or some kernel module failed. Windows asks you to reboot simply after installing some DLL's. I don't even bother to post my linux file server's uptime (kernel's still 2.2). - jla1987, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This will be good for my old 98 computer that I just got running again.
Gotta have an old one around for those games that XP just won't run. - inactivist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0donwilson2: Yes, I dislike waiting for reboot startup even though I've kept my systems pretty lean and mean (thanks to Syinternals Autoruns) - I don't like to wait for startups.
And, the machines are pretty stable when they are well maintained. Coming out of hibernation takes much less time than going thru an entire fresh startup sequence, at least for me.
Anyway, this is a personal preference, obviously. -
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