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Q: Several friends, much more computer savvy than I, have said to leave the computer turned on, in sleep mode, rather turning it off when not being used. They said this helps the computer last much longer.  Other voices say, turn it off when not being used–otherwise it is vulnerable to being accessed by hackers, etc.  So I turn to the real expert for the right answer. What is best–leave on or turn off when not being used.

– Nancy L.
Shalimar, Florida

A: Ah, to power off or not — one of those great mythical questions of the technical universe.  If you asked this question to a random group of Geeks, you’d very likely get a different opinion from each one.  I hope you’ll bear that in mind when you read my reply.

I’m not saying they are wrong, but have your friends given you any reason why they have that opinion?  How much longer is “much longer”?  Anything beyond a few years and the system becomes obsolete.  On the other side, has anyone been able to tell you exactly how your computer is “vulnerable to being accessed by hackers” if you leave it on?  That’s what properly configured firewalls are for.  I’m guessing the answer to both questions is “no”, which makes all those opinions just so much unreliable rhetoric.

My opinion is that what’s “best” is what works best for you.  I personally leave four different systems in my house powered on all the time, but it’s not to save on wear and tear from starting and shutting down.  It’s so that they are instantly available when I or Spouse Peripheral need to use them, rather than having to wait for Windows to boot and come online just so we can add something to a shopping list, or see if any e-mail has arrived.  Do I advocate this for everyone?  No, because our computers end up being left on during thunderstorms that happen at night or while we’re out, and they also use electricity 24×7.  But that’s our choice, and it works for us.

Q: I belong to several Yahoo Groups and find some of the messages have odd characters in them. For instance, what should be a simple apostrophe is displayed as 1’ instead.  Some posts containing spaces are filled with                       Â.  I suspect this is a font problem.  It seems to show up occasionally on other web sites as well.  But is the fault with the web designer’s or poster’s font choice or with the font I use in my browser?  Or am I off-base in suspecting fonts in the first place?

– Bill B.
Niceville, Florida

A: The answer to this is probably far geekier than you’re going to want to deal with, Bill.  I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is not a font issue.  It has to do with what is called character encoding in the web page, which is a way of representing text so it is viewable on multiple computer platforms (Apple, Windows, Linux, etc).  Depending on the encoding scheme used, an individual character can be represented with several bytes of data.  In the case of 1’, an apostrophe is encoded using four other characters, and I can tell by looking at it that it uses what is called UTF-8 encoding, which, if you really want to be geeky, you can read about on this Wikipedia page: tinyurl.com/5ha63. The simplest explanation I can give is that it appears that some people are posting text to the group using a text encoding.  Your browser is getting confused because the header at the top of the web page is telling it to expect one type of text encoding, and some entries are using something else, so your browser is displaying it wrong. When this happens, you might consider overriding your browser’s text encoding scheme.  In Internet Explorer, pull down the “View” menu and select “Encoding”.  Try selecting “UTF-8” and see if that doesn’t help.  This will very likely mess up other posts, so be sure and switch it back when you’re done.