After about a week with WD - I’m obsessed and hooked! So much to learn yet…
As of right now, I have WD running on my main working machine that I use for a number of things. I do leave my machine running all day when at work, but have always been in the habit of turning off at night while sleeping.
In order for WD to “do its thing”, the machine should be running 24/7. For some reason I’m a little apprehensive about leaving it running all day/night. Beside the obvious power usage issue, what is the consensus of leaving the machine on? I do have my monitor set to go to standby after 10 minutes. What about the hard drive etc? Would the life of the hard drive be affected?
I do want to get/build another box just for running WD, but need to save up for that a bit. Right now it comes down to a choice of purchasing WD or getting a box to run it.
Snowman,
I went through exactly what your going through about 3 years ago. I finally started leaving my PC on for weather. I now have 5 PC’s on 24/7. Some say it will actually lengthen the life of hard drives and other internals because they are not being powered on and off so often. As far as utilities I do not notice that much of a difference. I keep the monitors off and use netmeeting to manage my weather server and home automation server. Jump in and you’ll never look back. The other nice thing is you can build/buy a really low power consumption PC if you look at some of the small cube PC’s that make excellent dedicated Weather servers.
I agree 100%, only way to go. Most monitors now have very low power standby, and if you use a KVM (or remote admin) you don’t need an extra (dedicated) monitor anyway.
I started to look at using small cubes but was scared off by the heat issues since one of my machines sees > 90F ambient in the summer. I ended up with a couple of very reliable surplus HP boxes.
Greg, what can you recommend for a low heat cube?
Thanks for the replies - that is kind of what I’ve always thought. It’s time for a good box cleaning anyway. I did leave it on last night and just love the data and displays I get from WD - I can see what was happening while I slept!
I am going to look for an old box to run dedicated for WD. I can run remote desktop on it.
I used here talk that keeping computers running is more energy efficient than turning them on and off. Also, moniters are big users of power, if you don’t have one, or turn it off, that helps a lot too 
yes, leaving a PC on all the time is better for it
its the heating/cooling cycle that stresses the solder joints and causes hairline cracks, that then causes random problems.
the onlything to check is to clean dust out of the PC case/motherboard/cpu fan every now and then, and also put a drop of sewing machine oil on the pc fan (remove the sticker), or buy a new one, when the fan gets noisy (you dont want it seizing!)
I’ve had at least one PC, and often more than one, running 247 since 1987 (barring a few days for moving house and the odd case of equipment failure). I can’t say I’ve noticed any major difference in failure rates between PCs that are left running or power cycled as required. I guess you actually get more CPU cycles between failures for the 247 devices though.
Needless to say it’s not the same PC from 1987 that’s still running!
and what did you do with yourself while no pc’s were running!
was there life after the PC??? 8O
LOL
my current PC runs 24/7 - or darn near close to that barring the odd power blip or maintenance.
had it for 18 months now - it is my only machine so is used extensively on a daily basis for all manner of stuff - WD never suffers even when CPU is being hogged by SETI@home or other intensive programs.
Machine currently up for over 11 days.
Just did a good box cleaning, and going to leave it running.
Another question…
I’m running XP PRO, and is quite stable.
Do any of you reboot at a certain time just to keep memory etc cleaned up?
Needless to say it's not the same PC from 1987 that's still running!
Darn, I was impressed until you specified that. What we need is WD for VMS, those boxes run for ever and ever without even a reboot.
http://weather-watch.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=30738#30738
check that out guys
thats the 2nd big floods, the worst in living memory for 2 places in NZ, this year!
(global warming/extreme weather?)
Brian, all I can say is “WOW!”
You said it is winter there - could that all have been snow?
Another question....
I'm running XP PRO, and is quite stable.
Do any of you reboot at a certain time just to keep memory etc cleaned up?
With W2K I just leave them running, power failures are usually the only reason they get shutdown/rebooted.
no, it as 13oC at that time
it never snows in that area of NZ
most of coatal NZ is snow free…except for the south island where they can get snow to low levels on the coast at times
(the mountains get plenty of snow through,there are even glaciers)
Do any of you reboot at a certain time just to keep memory etc cleaned up?
My main reason for reboots these days is installing software or an XP patch that needs a reboot. Otherwise XP is 24*7.
Mind you WD on WinME does pretty well and the Fedora Core 1 box is chugging along happily, but really will need a reboot soon to get it up to FC2.
and what did you do with yourself while no pc's were running!
was there life after the PC???
I felt stressed out waiting for replacement parts. For more than 8 years I was running a bulletin board (AX25 - amateur packet radio), so for the sake of my users I wanted it back on air ASAP.
Machine currently up for over 11 days.
Now why did I go and say that!!!
Power blip this evening put paid to that as I found out after being out for a couple of hours!!
Still it gave me a chance to download latest security patches and also to get running ver 10.14c of WD 
let’s see how long the PC stays up for this time!!
Perhaps I need to splash out on a UPS!
actualy, wait for 10.14d beta
somehow i some code somewhere that has increased cpu use…
(but a test i have done as fresh settings and in client mode, and the cpu use is OK)
(and in 10.14d i have fixed higher cpu use than needed for updating the clientra.txt file
who else has noticed an increease in cpu use of weatherd.exe , and in what version?
at work now - will have to check my CPU usage when I get home again in the morning