Re: Shutdown my Laptop? Why should I?

[marlin9@gmx.ch]

This is an interesting thread, i have the same questions. 

Derek Broughton <news@pointerstop.ca>:
                
| It's relevant to the question because it was suggested that laptop drives
| shouldn't be in use 24/7, but we've been able to spin them down when
| inactive for years - and now apparently when moved, too.  So this isn't why
| we need to consider shutdowns.

There's some check and cleanup stuff boot and init processes.
I wonder if a hibernating machine would have to do some of this 
for each wakeup too.

I don't know how much time or disk-activity a modern journalling FS like reiser 
or ext3 needs to find harddisc (hardware) bugs. Maybe that's already managed 
by the drive itself, too. But this is the first thing that comes to my mind.
  
| I never shutdown my laptop, except to switch kernels (definitely not for
| other upgrades).

There's an (experimental) 'kexec-call' option to switch kernel on-the-fly.
I hope this will work well some day, at least in defined environments. 
Imagine to compile anything on demand within the running system some day....

-- Maren


ps.  As fot the shock protection, does anybody know if this kernel option under 
devices/hardware monitoring is related ?

 CONFIG_SENSORS_HDAPS:                                                                     
                                                                                              
    This driver provides support for the IBM Hard Drive Active Protection                     
    System (hdaps), which provides an accelerometer and other misc. data.                     
    ThinkPads starting with the R50, T41, and X40 are supported.  The                         
    accelerometer data is readable via sysfs.