It would have to be a very old version of Minecraft. The recent ones take a lot of CPU power and RAM, even without mods.

It would probably work great for something like a Quake III or Unreal Tournament server though.

Try booting from a live disk. If it works there, it’s probably an update or config change that’s causing problems.

Just press Control+Shift+U, enter the unicode value in hex, then press enter.

Just keep in mind that you can’t wipe the bad sectors that have been remapped. That’s unlikely to be an issue for a personal drive, but something to consider if it held particularly sensitive information.

I encrypt everything that leaves my house since it could be easily lost or stolen, but it is rather inconvenient.

If someone breaks into my house, I’ve got bigger problems than someone getting their hands on my media collection. I think it would be more likely for me to mess something up and loose access to my data than for someone to steal it.

You can get power strips that will sense the load on one outlet and shut all the others off if the load is below a certain amount. They are handy for shutting off those annoying standby LEDs automatically.

My laptop has been up for 123 days. It gets put in standby when it’s not in use. I should probably reboot into a new kernel soon.
My desktop gets shut down at night because it’s power hungry.
My server gets shut down about once a year for cleaning and hardware upgrades.

If you let the laptop sit for years, the battery will be dead and there is a small chance that the SSD may be corrupted. They are only rated to retain data for a year without power.

Debian will have updates, but apart from the browser, it will typically only be security and bug fix updates.

It’s better to just put the display to sleep when it’s not in use anyways. We only used screensavers because CRT monitors took so long to fully warm up.

Because that would take a long time if you deleted a large file in another partition or drive. You could also end up not having enough space to move the file to trash and if the trash directory is on an SSD, it would add a lot of unnecessary wear to it.