Charles on… anything that comes along

By some odd coincidence, three times this week I’ve come across Mac OS X users who don’t know the benefits of logging out. That is, they either leave the machine running at night (still logged into their user account), or they put the machine to sleep. They rarely — if ever — log out, and only reboot when “something is wrong” or after installing a system update.

My comment: that’s because you’ve run into what we call “normal people” who don’t live to serve their computer, but vice-versa.

My advice: log out once per day. You might just log out at night when you’re done using the computer, leave the machine running, then log in again in the morning. (It’s ok to let the monitor/display/screen/whatever-you-call-it go to sleep.)

My reaction: GTF out of here!

This accomplishes a couple of things, at least:

• If you generally run the same software applications most of the time, it will clear out a lot of memory and give those apps a chance to “start over.” This is a very good thing for nearly every modern program: most will run faster, and it will put a stop to some “weird behavior” (that’s the technical term). This helps on Windows, too.
• Leaving your Mac running (but logged off) at night allows the system (via a utility called cron that you’ll never see) to run some system maintenance utilities: another minor performance boon, and it will save a little space on your hard drive. (I actually don’t know if Windows does anything like this also.)

Actually, I’d rather have an operating system that’s intelligent enough to be able to deal with my using it all the time as the same user. Is that really too much to ask? “A utility called cron that you’ll never see” - no, please, condescend to me some more. (Cron will run whether you log out or not, actually. It runs all the time. Logging out has no effect on its runningness. I use it to do stuff to my email and other stuff all the time.)

This is stupid fatalism. Apple and Microsoft should be able to - in fact, can - write an OS that can handle my being logged on pretty much permanently, thanks very much.
Plus, there are huge disbenefits to logging out. I have to close all my documents. I have to quit my apps. Logging in and restarting those apps will take at least five minutes (conservative estimate), which I don’t feel like spending. Add those up over a week and you’ve got 25 minutes; over a month, it’s two hours; over a year, a whole day. Why should I give up a day of my time to lousy coding?
And of course that assumes that this step is necessary - which I don’t think it is. I’d give my uptime, except it’s rubbish at the moment, for reasons I’ll write about later.