Computer Startup Time

Last week I needed to quickly print something but the computer was off. It took 45 minutes before I was able to print it, and even then it was still mostly unresponsive. The culprit appeared to be Sophos, although there were probably other things like checking for updates. I asked the clerk and he said this is normal, so I suggested they just leave it on all the time but reboot weekly when they leave for the day.

Has anyone else experienced performance this bad? Is there a way to delay Sophos from doing anything until some period after startup, and to have it only run when the computer is idle? My Norton software has this, although it doesn't seem to work exactly as it should. I have one machine at home that takes about 10 minutes before it's usable, and it is really frustrating.

Our clerk office computer has a note on it from the STS to leave it running and lock the screen when we leave. But when we do have to reboot due to a software patch, it seems to not take longer than normal.

I was notified recently that our stake clerk PC was running slow and asked if there was anything I could do. Once it completely booted up, it ran fine. I didn't trace it down to Sophos (which doesn't surprise me), I just put a note on it to logout when finished, but leave it running. That seemed to have fixed it.

When the PC drops into deep sleep from inactivity it uses very little power, but can wake at times to run important updates, reboot if needed, run virus scans, and other tasks. This allows it to wake ready to go, rather than burden the user with all that stuff at once from a cold boot.

In older versions of Windows it didn't seem like they would actually wake to perform any tasks, but if they do now then that would be ideal. I'll check with other units and see if they are leaving them on. Thanks.

Before deciding to leave them on, I'd consider the office temperatures when no one is present, as well as the electrical reliability. But power can mess up computers. Running them in high heat will also cook them.

You may want to configure the unit to hibernate if unused for a period of time. I prefer hibernate over sleep as the computer uses no power when hibernating. But if the power fails while asleep, you could come back to a corrupted system.

Thanks, good points. I'm assuming they are all set to sleep but will check.