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Post being replied to

There was a good reasoned analysis of this recently by ravenium

Like many of us olds, I resent having to watch a damned youtube video to get useful information. However, this guy's about as close to a Real Engineer as you'll get and (youtube window dressing aside) a lot more coherent than most places.

The gist is that it's not going to affect homebuilders at all, only pre-builts, and even then if you're a "high expansion" PC (which a lot of the current crop are) you're exempt. The people who seem to get hosed are the mid-market prebuilts. This is also 4 year old legislation, so it's been around a while.

Having said that, I haven't quite figured out the net effect it's supposed to have, given the builds it does affect. I mean, I leave my PC on all the time but I tell it to sleep after 2 hours of inactivity. I would wager my power saving methods are better than a lot of the kids, who are probably trying to coin mine in their idle time. If this drives better idle-state management I think it'll be a good thing.

However, naturally that doesn't sound as fun as "California bans gaming PCs!" which I admit made me think "ugh, California's at it again" at first.