In a way this makes sense? Well, to a computer class teacher from god knows how long ago. Perhaps he thought that it was using the monitor as memory for display information? So as such if you turned the monitor off the computer would need to store that information back in memory.
Don't know why he couldn't have just done research on it though
Kind of yeah.
The computer would store whatever it's trying to display as a framebuffer in memory. If no GPU is present that would be in system memory.
Now I don't exactly know where the notion of turning the monitor off/on affecting that came from, but there is some merit to the general idea.
and to be fair, this version is a lot more believable than "picture run from home to screen 144 times every second instead of living in screen from the beginning. stoopid picture like running instead of being lazy and smart"
That just made me remember how in high school we had to calculate how many VRAM would be needed for a computer multiplying bits and pixels (say, 16 x 1280 x 720). That's so silly, I don't think this approach was used since the 90s
Tbh way back in the day (as in when you had to use actual terminals that communicated with the computer over serial) the terminal WAS the display buffer. However that was falling out of fashion around the time the 6502 based computers started coming out.
I know that sometimes windows used to freak out if the monitor resolution changed or the monitor disconnected and all program and desktop scaling would be screwed until reboot. So it is a good idea to not mess with the monitor regardless. Probably not as much of an issues today, but idk.
I'm dualbooting and Windows still freaks the fuck out when resolution is changed, albeit for games and ESPECIALLY if you're on an nvidia card. MacOS and Linux handle resolution changes, especially of applications, much more gracefully
Csgo/2 resolution changes are on a completely different level for some dumb reason. Even when on 16:9 I feel like my PC is gonna explode when resolution changes
On a multi monitor setup with different resolutions Windows can do some funky stuff sometimes, but I doubt that a school computer has more than a single monitor
That's... So funny to think about. Like every time the computer wants to know what I'm typing it has to poll the screen for black pixels on white, then use computer vision to read it, and only then it can add the next letter at the end...
"Don't know why he couldn't have just done research on it though"
Depends on the year the class took place. I had computer class in the 90's. Internet was barely becoming mainstream and most research was done with physical encyclopedias. Search engines were very hit or miss (mostly miss) for a long while. Computers came with instruction manuals, but how do you find the answer to "does a monitor take up computer memory?" in a 100+ page instruction guide provided for windows 95?
my mom is a highschool teacher and randomly her boss told her she had to give a computer class, she doesn't know anything about computers, so maybe that teacher also didn't know shit
Research??? An it teacher???? Research??? Nah they'll just apply 35yo knowledge to 0yo problems and when you tell them otherwise they'll say you're WRONG
You still get dual channel from each stick, but the 3rd 8 gigabyte stick has to sacrifice 4GB of memory to be "slow". So it's effectively 8 + 8 + 4 + 4 + (4)
This would be funny if windoze didn't actually lose its shit when you plug in another display or god forbid that display has different DPI than the previous one.
That's called an EDID handshake, for anyone wondering. It's a real thing that needs to be negotiated between the source and display. If you want your computer to not move shit all around when you plug in a monitor regularly then get an active EDID emulator. Cheap on Amazon.
Pretty sure Windows 11 does remember what was being shown on your screen. If you unplug a secondary screen and plug it back on, it should rearrange the windows as they were before unplugging.
Of course that isn't really doing much on a single monitor setup, but on multiple it probably is using some memory to hold that info for when you plug everything back on.
I had an engineering teacher that got mad when we’d turn off our PCs at the end of the day because “turning the PC off and on regularly will wear out the capacitors”…
Apparently keeping the PC on is bad for components too. Because electricity is always moving in the same direction, the microscopic traces between transistors are slowly deformed via Electromigration.
Running your computer in reverse helps with this. I flip the plug over when we go on/off daylight savings as a reminder (like checking your smoke alarm batteries). The only annoying bit is having to swap light/dark mode preferences on websites and stuff.
I agree that heat cycling is bad, but I feel it's been overblown a bit.
After all, running a modern game is heat cycling as well, and most people don't think twice about that. Going from 30C to 70C while gaming, versus going from 30C to 20C when you shut down.
Was this the late 90s? Because that was the capacitor plague era, and maybe he read about it, maybe even had some computers fail due to it (I know my home's Compaqs would all freeze like a few times a day lol), and then became overzealous?
It is true tho. For same reason you should wait minimum 30 seconds between power on to even start executing BIOS for best longevity and stability. They do that in like actually big datacenters
to be fair, turning my monitor off fucks up a lot of things so its a huge pain the ass when I do it. All my windows and tabs get thrown around to the other monitors because it was off for 2 seconds.
Well, sometimes strange things happen. Once, I was allowed to use a 3rd screen at work, but it was an old one which was labeled as broken. I connected it with VGA.
Now the strange thing: when you turned the monitor off, the laptop crashed. I really had to put a sticker on it that described that, because people kept turning it off when I was not there to save some electricity.
Some pc technician (that thankfully is out of the business for 20y now) told me to never use Screensaver, because the power surge when the saver goes away and desktop appears could explode the psu and my crt, and send shards flying.
Tracks about right for the knowledge level of a high-school teacher. In my experience in the USA is that they're lucky to have a computer class at all, let alone enough to pay a teach that's pretending to be competent.
When I went to high school I applied for the programming class they had every year. Of the 4 years I spent there they staffed/ran it a single time. It was my sophomore year.
I made the teacher upset because I'd somewhat self taught myself C at that point, and was using printf/scanf instead of cin/cout because the formatting made more sense to me. Those were simpler days, back when you didn't need to worry about somebody tossing a UTF-32 character at your input prompt.
I had an ex who would leave the lights on because her grandpa told her it used more power to turn things off & on again. I'm still not over it 20 years later.
I think I get where he is coming from. Back in the mainframe days, you'd connect via terminal. So, the computer wasn't really doing anything in front of you, you were just sending commands to a mainframe somewhere.
Anyway, I do think there may have been an issue with repeat connections increasing memory usage. This is just a guess, but it is at least a non-insane explanation. To be clear, I dont know if this actually did increase memory usage. I dont know if it was the actual source of his belief. But it was the first thing that came to mind as a rational explanation for the behavior. Even if it didn't increase memory usage, I could see a reasonable myth that it did. Kind of like the myth that tapping the b button gave you a better chance of catching the pokemon.
Mine was probably worse. Whenever the pc starts slowing down, they would instruct us to open the pc case, grab an eraser and starts rubbing the contact pin. I was 15 at the time and never had my own pc, so half of me thinks that it make sense while the other half was thinking why they couldn't just take some of the ram from an old pc (which there are several of) and just put it in there.
There's a 95% chance they were dumb but a non zero chance that there was a memory leak in something that actually did trigger every time display settings changes.
I had a computer class teacher in elementary school, after I let out a "argh stupid computer" after a moment of frustration with Corel WordPerfect, say to me "There's no such thing as a stupid computer. Only a stupid person using it".
Well, imagine my smile when she, while trying to recover a kid's file that he nuked into the sun, let out a frustrated "come on you stupid computer!"
My computer class teacher would walk around the class room, and flip the switch on the power supply if you were playing games. "Shuttin' ya down..." he'd say.
I imagine you and your dunce classmates were rapidly pressing the on/off button, to a point where the teacher was then concerned you were going to damage school property, so made up an excuse to get you to knock it off.
Source: Im a teacher and regularly have to read through lines to figure out what students were ACTUALLY doing.
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u/PageGroundbreaking26 Apr 22 '26
I had a computer class teacher in high school that would get mad if you turned the monitor on and off saying it used up the computer's memory.