[conspire] idle computer

[Paul Zander]

When is a computer idle or “not in use”? From time to time I get myself be-fuddled by a computer that pauses when it is not finished with _my_ task. As background, I have to admit that I started using computers when they were really used for computation. Occasionally, I run some simulation program that will take hours to do numeric modeling. I expect that there are readers of this email that have need to run really long “make” scripts.

I also remember adding a circuit to my CP/M computer to power down the floppy drives after a period of inactivity. The timing was set by hardware.

Two examples from my experience:

When SETI at HOME came out, I thought it was a really neat idea. I was glad to see idle computer time put to something potentially useful and installed it on several machines. One day, I started a computer simulation of my own. I launched it just before I went to a meeting and expected my results would be available when I returned. As you have probably guessed, I was disappointed that my work was preempted by a search for ET phoning home. For a while, I changed the screen saver settings, depending on what I was doing, but eventually I stopped running SETI.

More recently I was installing Linux (LMDE to be precise) on a laptop. After I had answered all of the questions and saw that files were being copied, I walked away and expected it would be done when I got back. I returned to a black display. I wiggled the mouse and I saw that files were still copying. Hum, this is taking a bit longer than I expected. So I was patient and did something else. The install was still copying files. In all, it took something like 12 hours of wall clock time to finish the install.

* Are ACPI setting written by Windows stored where they would effect the Linux install? 

* Why does a computer that is busy copying files think it is “not in use”?

* Am I the only person that uses a computer for something other than email | Facebook | watching videos?

* Is there a way to check for lack of disk and CPU usage before going to idle | standby | hibernate | screen-saver ?