Sylvia Else wrote:
D Yuniskis wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:

In the Seattle area, an outage is often followed by a restoration,
than a second outage. I've learned to wait to reboot.

You also have to make sure your PC is set to *neither*
"turn on" nor "resume previous state" when power is
restored. Nothing gets me more anxious than watching
the lights flicker, PC going off, then on, then off,
then on... just let the damn thing go *off* and *I*
can figure out when it's best to turn it back on!

:-/

I suppose it's a matter of taste, and infrastructure reliability. Hard
to know what's going on in Seattle. It sounds as if restoration is
somewhat by experiment. Where I live, a prolonged outage, if it's not
load shedding (which has so far thankfully been rare), it's an equipment
failure, and the technicians are able to fix it definitively before
restoring the power. The guys on the ground seem to know what they're
doing, for which one has to be grateful.

I have lived in places where most of the electrical infrastructure
was "hanging from poles" and, in those places, it seemed like
outages caused by "downed lines" (think: ice) often were a
noticeable blink (off) of the lights followed very quickly
by a real outage. Perhaps one is caused by an "unexpected
event" and the other is the system's *designed* reaction to
that event (e.g., a breaker deliberately tripping).

When I lived in those places, I had machines that had mechanical
power switches -- "on" was ON and "off" was OFF! The time between
each of these transitions (blink off, blink back on, then final
outage) was fast enough that you couldn't reach the power switch
to *prevent* the PC from coming back on -- and then off -- again.

I don't like expecting to do something on my PC and finding that it's
been powered down (PCs in this houseold are left running all the time),
so they're configure in memory mode - they boot up after an outage if
they were running before. We just power the monitors down when they're
not in use.

We try to be concious of our energy use (abuse?). Since the
machines use a fair amount of power (triple redundant power
supplies and fans, etc.) we try to turn things off when they
aren't actively "doing something". On the other hand, there
are often 5 or 6 machines running concurrently out of necessity.
(no need for space heaters in those conditions -- and something
to definitely avoid in the Summer months! : )