On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:23 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > >>> a) You think I, or a *lot* of other folks, are going to do that at home? >>> (Please - I'm trying to get my fiancee to at *least* go from >>> *shudder* Vista to Win7) >> >> If you leave them on, add up the power cost of running an old box for >> years. > > Sorry, that doesn't work either: *everything* new seems to need a lot more > power than the older stuff. Certainly, last time I upgraded my own system, > I had to buy one that was 150% the power of the old one. That was probably before power became a big thing for servers - in most cases now power and cooling are the limiting factors for expansion in a data center. Most of the new servers use 2.5" drives and while they might still use as much power per 1u of space due to using more blades in a chassis or having more CPUs and RAM, we get much more performance from the same space and power consumption. It's not such a big deal for desktops, but you can get small low power systems if you look around - or just use a laptop that will sleep when you close the lid. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com