Preserved Topic: To shut down or to leave it on?

What do you do with your computer over night (or better to say whenever you sleep)?
To shut down or just leave it on? What do you think is better?

I shut both me machines down whenever I am not using them for more than a couple of hours. Never leave em up overnight or when I am out to work or play.

My main concern is electrical surges so if theres a storm in the area or if I cannot be around to shut down I would prefer not to take the chance of copping a surge... kind of a childhood hang up .. plus I don't see a reason to waste electricity.

The only thing I have heard negative about turning me machine off and on so much is that it could be harder or more stressful to my hard drives.. but so far that hasnt been the case. One of my machines is 3.5 yrs old and the other is about 1.5 and so far never had any problems (well none that werent operator error! heh)

I actually unplug everything too.. ok.. call me paranoid ~Vp~

Depends if I think I'm going to be getting up in the middle of the night. Or just fall asleep in the living room. Sometimes I just turn the monitor off, then forget and hit the switch on the computer which really messes me up.

I usually leave my machine on all the time and I only reboot when I need to defrag the ram or for other reasons.

This is actually a point of contention among pc techs. It's never really been proven whether either way is better, and you'll get a lot of anecdotal evidence but no hard facts. It's actually not really a big deal to leave your machine running all the time.

Power surges are a possibility, but there more likely during the times you use your computer (peak hours when everyone is awak) and you could also protect yourself with a UPS if you have enough cash or a good powerstrip if not.

.

[This message has been edited by moaiz (edited 07-12-2001).]

This also depends on what OS your running.

And I've heard talk that constant on/off has a chance of causing heat fractures in your cup after a very extended period of time. True or not???? don't know. But at times I've had about 5 PC's set up in my study and they'd be switched on/off all the time, some of them were old 486/s but nothing ever broke??

I build my pc's myself and I'm always too darn lazy to set up the power saving features so I just switch them off when I'm not using them.



everybody needs a swamp bear

I've always left mine on all the time unless I am leaving town for extended periods of time. I've got it set to go on standby and power down the monitor after about 30 min.

Where I work we have 15 classrooms with about 20 computers in each room. Those computers are never shut down. Not even over the weekends. They are work horses too. They get reimaged for new software nightly and used by people who sometimes have no idea how to work with even basic windows. They run anything from Win95 to Win2000 depending on the needs of the particular class for that day.

Normally I don't shut either of my computers off. A lot of my friends live all around the globe and since I have bad sleeping habbits I usually end up talking to them on ICQ or AIM. Also a lot at night I'm either uploading or downloading.


.sig by Weadah.

I definitely agree with building your own system. It's cheaper as well.

Usually, the first thing I do on my system is disable all of the power saving features. All of them. I do a lot of things that require processing time (3D modelling, video editing, etc.) and it's a pain in the ass having your disk shut down in the middle of something. Also, the few extra seconds it takes to come out of power saving mode are too long for me.

However, I always turn my monitors off when I'm not using the comp. It's a habit I've gotten into since I never use a screen saver.

My parents win98 system has to be shut down all the time becuase of memory problems. My 2k system runs 24/7 and hardly ever gets turned off...

The Linux system also hardly every turns off either.

Haven't run a Mac system in years so don't know much about that...

-mage-

I have a G4 that only gets shut down when I'll be away for a day or more. No problems so far.

-cyoung

I have a computer running linux and one running win2k...i usually leave both of them on all the time. Occasionally i might turn the win2k on off if I feel like it. But I have no reason to. However, I will shut it off in a storm or something. Which has been quite frequently lately. Storms all over the place. I gotta get me a UPS or something

None of our machines are ever shut down unless they are being moved or worked on. We run Windows 2000 on everything, so the stability is there. It's not uncommon for us to go two or three months between reboots.

Now, Windows 95/98/ME can't do that. Microsoft even mentions on their site not to do that, as there are known resource issues with that kernel.

All of our equipment is protected by APC UPS systems, and quality surge protectors.

I leave mine on all the time, unless I'll be gone for more than a day....

I run win98, and I have to reboot every 2-3 weeks to avoid problems.

why? just like it that way.

Leave it on

~sig? i don't need no stinkin sig~

Pugz is right, and there are a lot of memory leaks with that kernel, but it's nothing that can't be fixed with a hard boot. You don't need to do this with Win2k because it defrages RAM on the fly (sort of). So, you can keep a Win98 machine on all the time, but you will need to reboot somewhat often.

umm i normaly shut down most nights(mornings, heh) running win2k...its just habit i guess, and i always turn off and unplug everything in a storm...my ibook never gets shutdown...

on - on - on! But when I go to sleep I turn it off - off - off!

<--self portrait

I always leave my desktop and laptop on. But sometimes when I sit by my desk and need to do some work I usually reboot after I know that my computer was on for too many days. It dumps all the junk from the memory when you reboot it.

threep shakes his head, and says:
"even though i have bugger all ram, and should restart to flush the damned thing out, i rarely ever do.
its a work pc, and nearly everytime i restart my pc, it rebuilds heaps of settings - like web history, cookies, passwords.... it really sucks, i hate typing in full URL's!"

Lately I've been leaving it on for most of the day and night because I've on the Net or writing emails, having Skaarjj over to play games on my really good computer while I watch or watch and learn from him doing animation, I myself doing some animating, editing a stupid bloody music concert from my old school which had it September last year. I'm just trying to render it now. Jeeezzz....it takes up a lot of room.

-=Luxo Jr.=-

Doin' wierdassed animations since 1986

From an energy standpoint...Wouldn't it save a few bucks a month to shut it off though?

It all depends mbridge. Constant shutting off and turning would use more energy (think stop and go traffic) than leaving it running (highway driving).