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I know a lot of people just leave their desktops on all night (including me) and resume zombi-ness in the morning. However, other than possible memory leaks, what are the pitfalls of this? I've seen from personal experience that Linux systems do better than Windows systems, in the sense that a PC will slow down to a halt after large periods of uptime (might be different with the newer Windows'). I'm running OpenSuse and some other flavours of Linux, does this still apply to me?

Also, let's say I want to shut my desktop before I go to bed. Is there ANY way for me to bring it back up at a certain time. This may seem like a completely idiotic question but I wonder...

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Some PC bios's have a wakeup/bootup timer, not sure if yours does. I see no problems of long uptime in windows XP or W7 myself, if there is it is usually due to some faulty program, driver or service that was installed. –  Moab Apr 17 '11 at 23:56
This might be related: superuser.com/questions/179242 –  David Z Apr 18 '11 at 1:13
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Some BIOSes support bringing up a machine at a given time. One caveat is that your system time may be stored in UTC, which means that you'll need to offset the desired boot time appropriately.

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Any suggestions on how to search for this in Google? I'm using my motherboard model along with the keywork "wakeup" and "boot timer" and I'm not getting anything significant. I've never updated my BIOS so I'm pretty sure I still have the original version. My motherboard is an Asus M3N78 Pro. –  MaxMackie Apr 18 '11 at 0:03
It's probably a lot easier to go into your BIOS and look for something called "Wake Up Timer". –  Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Apr 18 '11 at 0:11
Wow, exams are really taking a toll on my cognitive capacities. I checked my BOIS and found a couple viable options: "Power on by RTC Alarm" and "Onboard LAN boot rom" and a bunch of "Power on by..." followed by different devices (external modem, pci/pcie, ps/2 keyboard). Any of these what I'm looking for? –  MaxMackie Apr 18 '11 at 0:36
RTC alarm seems to be what I'm looking for. Thanks for pointing me there. –  MaxMackie Apr 18 '11 at 0:42
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Adding an answer for your question - not related but I just wanted to add. If you want to shutdown your machine after a certain amount of time, you can use the command:

shutdown -h 120

Where 120 is the minutes after which the system will shutdown.

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This only works in Windows, but the Linux command is similar (using the -t parameter and a number of seconds). I was thinking of using this for the shutdown part :) –  MaxMackie Apr 18 '11 at 0:55
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