Shutting down machines at night

[ColinP]

they soon learn

[ITGURU]

Does anyone have users moan about shutting down at night? As they're used to just "locking the PC with 20 documents open and coming back next day to refer to quickly"...?

 

No moaning..i do a force shutdown every night , don't have open files backup so if they have files open they wont get backed up. We've not got SSDs in the teacher machines so no need to leave on overnight as quick enough to start up and get logged on.

 

Once I told them how much electric we save by switching them off, everyone was surprised.

[forkies]

No moaning..i do a force shutdown every night , don't have open files backup so if they have files open they wont get backed up. We've not got SSDs in the teacher machines so no need to leave on overnight as quick enough to start up and get logged on.

 

Once I told them how much electric we save by switching them off, everyone was surprised.

 

Guess that is "we've got SSDs" instead of "we've not got SSDs" otherwise please tell me what you are doing... my teacher moan even with SSDs on a 10s boot!

 

Otherwise yes we shutdown everything every night except if logged in, if idle for more than 45 mins then shutdown enforced. Except certain computers such as finance and data because they leave lots open that seems to cause issue if closed every night.

[ITGURU]

Guess that is "we've got SSDs" instead of "we've not got SSDs" otherwise please tell me what you are doing... my teacher moan even with SSDs on a 10s boot!

 

Otherwise yes we shutdown everything every night except if logged in, if idle for more than 45 mins then shutdown enforced. Except certain computers such as finance and data because they leave lots open that seems to cause issue if closed every night.

 

Yes sorry, it's my normal typo error - I always write not instead on now! lol

[mavhc]

Why not just hibernate them? All mine are set to suspend after 10 mins or so.

[forkies]

Why not just hibernate them? All mine are set to suspend after 10 mins or so.

 

Not sure if it has changed but we used to get errors on every single staff machine from Sims and other database based software due to hibernation. We turned off sleep ability the next day.

[jonspurs]

Thanks for the replies and I agree with you all - SSDs/electricity.

 

Hibernate is an idea but that doesn't install updates which Windows is waiting on a restart/shutdown for.

[mavhc]

Windows installs updates at the time you specify, just specify 3am

[karldenton]

We use Netsupport DNA power management feature to shut down PCs. Does a great job even on computers that are off-site.

We are looking at getting our HP8200s to boot on LAN in bios so will use DNA to boot them up as well.

[6Foot2]

On a related note, some of our PCs restart after shutdown.

 

Causes ruled out (by experimentation):

 

Impero policy, Windows build/rebuild, Group Policy, BIOS upgrade/downgrade, Specific PC make/model.

[jonspurs]

Windows installs updates at the time you specify, just specify 3am

 

But I'm not sure if that includes reboots whilst a user is logged on.

[jonspurs]

On a related note, some of our PCs restart after shutdown.

 

Causes ruled out (by experimentation):

 

Impero policy, Windows build/rebuild, Group Policy, BIOS upgrade/downgrade, Specific PC make/model.

 

Some kind of wake-on-lan going on there...

[CyBeRkId2002]

We are quite tough on shutdowns here... we shutdown computers that are not being used hourly with a forced shutdown at 9:30pm for all those who have forgot to log-off. Every now and again someone will go to a computer at the exact time it shuts down but it's rare and with a boot-up taking in the region of 30 seconds (max) something we can live with.

 

Has been about 5 years since we implemented but at the time we did some monitoring of electricity spending and you would not believe the difference it made!!!

[mavhc]

Same power savings would work with sleep though, and then you'd have a 5 second start up

[azc]

We use Poweroff.exe from http://users.telenet.be/jbosman/poweroff/poweroff.htm

[GuyJD]

But then you have computers that never get shut down and never complete important updates.

 

We worked it out here that each computer costs about 6p per hour to run on idle so forcing a shutdown at night saves a fair bit over time.

[mavhc]

That's why you set windows update to install and force a reboot at 3am.

 

If you want set it to restart at 3am every day, reboots, installs GPO stuff etc, goes to sleep after 10 mins

[jthompson]

Same power savings would work with sleep though, and then you'd have a 5 second start up

 

I would agree. An aggressive sleep timer is preferable to a shutdown timer, imo. You can have it nice and short (10mins?) without frustrating legitimate usage, and it doesn't have to wait until after hours to begin saving energy.

[Katy]

We had a battle here, previously two schools that merged.. school A (where I was the network manager) we shut down every night at about 6pm if the PC was idle, school B shutdown was forbidden and all PCs were set to power up at 8am in the BIOS. Now in the merged school, after a battle with a deputy head (who came over from School B), PCs were shut down at 10pm (which I've slowly clawed back to 6pm regardless of whether they are logged on or not, a popup appears allowing anybody using the PC to postpone) and the new PCs didn't have power on BIOS options so we got round that too, result being we didn't have PCs turning on every single day in the holidays for no reason. Teachers eventually learned to turn the PC on a few minutes before they needed to use it (we're SSD now so it doesn't take as long to boot up unless Windows has done a big update)

[jthompson]

I should follow up my comment by saying that I have absolutely no numbers/evidence to back it up.

It would be interesting to be able to see how much of the computers' runtime is given to idling. That might better inform on whether a short sleep timout saves energy overall compared to forcing shutdowns.

[HPlum78]

I know someone has mentioned the sysinternals PsShutDown but another utility in that is the PsLoggedOn command, I will also point you at the godfather (Ed Wilson) of scripting post about this https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2011/03/17/use-powershell-to-detect-if-a-workstation-is-in-use/ as he has already written the powershell for you.

[mavhc]

We had a battle here, previously two schools that merged.. school A (where I was the network manager) we shut down every night at about 6pm if the PC was idle, school B shutdown was forbidden and all PCs were set to power up at 8am in the BIOS. Now in the merged school, after a battle with a deputy head (who came over from School B), PCs were shut down at 10pm (which I've slowly clawed back to 6pm regardless of whether they are logged on or not, a popup appears allowing anybody using the PC to postpone) and the new PCs didn't have power on BIOS options so we got round that too, result being we didn't have PCs turning on every single day in the holidays for no reason. Teachers eventually learned to turn the PC on a few minutes before they needed to use it (we're SSD now so it doesn't take as long to boot up unless Windows has done a big update)

 

It's best to specify in terms of what the users want, not what the computers do: eg:I want a computer to be usable within 30 seconds of touching it.

 

On the other side is cost: to leave computers on costs 20p per computer per day, and also creates 2 kg of co2 per computer per day.

 

More advantages of sleep mode: they can be off most of the day as well as all night.

[HPlum78]

Just a thought about using sleep mode, if you secure your desktops/ laptops using bit locker there are some considerations around the security of the keys. End user devices are not my thing these days so things could have changed.....

[mavhc]

In sleep mode the key is still in ram, but as the device is locked you can't perform an attack unless you can extract the ram's data directly from the ram chips. And we're talking about schools here, our secrets are protected by people whose password is given out to kids, or in rooms that anyone with a cleaner's outfit could access, 1000s of people accessing the buildings every day, holding doors open for each other, office machines left unlocked on reception. And half the time the entire building is left unlocked for 6 weeks in the summer.

[HPlum78]

Let's call that safe then! Lmao at that :-)