While this little bit of information was very informative and very important for people to know (I shared it with as many people as I could as soon as I heard it), one fairly serious problem with the suggestion to turn off your power bars when you're not using them (and the power bar for the computer being specifically mentioned) is:

Computers draw a tiny bit of power all the time to keep your hardware settings in memory and keep the clock running. There is a battery on the motherboard, but it is not very powerful, not meant for extended use, and not rechargeable. By turning off the power bar you force the computer to use this battery, and once the battery dies, every time you turn on your computer the clock will be reset, and worse (MUCH worse), all the hardware and other BIOS settings will be lost. For some people this will only mean an annoying little warning when they boot and then the computer will auto-detect all the drives and boot correctly, but for a lot of people who don't even know what a BIOS is or how to restore the settings themselves, this will mean an expensive trip to the computer store where the tech will charge you just to look at the computer, then spend (and bill) about an hour troubleshooting the problem (and possibly never find the problem since they'll have it plugged in the whole time, which will mean a return trip after you get it home and it resets again), and then some charge for replacing the battery and of course the battery itself, but even then, you'll be back there before you know it because the battery is going to die again because you'll continue turning off your power bar!!

The solution is to plug your PC directly in to the wall if possible, and then plug everything else in to your power bar (monitor, printer, scanner, etc.) ... then you would be safe to turn off your power bar when you are not using the computer.

Unfortunately, the majority of viewers will never read this post, but I'm sure the majority of them *will* start switching off their power bars ... I really think this should be addressed on the show since they've just caused potential problems for so many people ...


Rob

My mother just reminded me that most power strips also protect the computer from surges, so my solution is not good in that sense, and I am now at a loss.

There's a one outlet surge protector that you can plug directly into the wall and plug computer into that then computer is protected.
just google for "one outlet surge protector"

such like this; http://www.amazon.com/Philips-GBL1-1-Outlet-Household-Protector/dp/B000GB1NUO

or

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatSectionView.process?Section_Id=204073