A more basic question: ON or OFF?
 

There is a debate over which creates more wear and tear on your system: leaving it on or turning it off when not in use. The off people say leaving the system running wears it down. The on people say the strain of turning the system on and off is worse. Can anyone here put this debate to rest?

With my first computer I normally turned it off after use and never left it on and it died after about 2 years... On my Second computer i left it on 24/7 With occasionaly downtime for installation of various components but it has lasted me for over 4 years and now runs as a simple server at home again being on all the time My current computer has been running for over 100 days now since the last reboot and counting... :) ITs on 24/7 now

I think it's a matter of frequency. If you go long periods of time without using the computer (not really sure how to define that, though) then turning it off for those extended periods would be better.

Otherwise, leaving it on is a good option. I leave mine on. Even if I'm not actively using the computer, I may have it snagging some downloads or catching messages from people.

Ah, the ever-soothing hum of internal fans . . .

I leave my office computer on all the time, but I turn my home PC's off at night when I go to bed. Not sure why I do it this way. Maybe for the same reason I turn the lights out when I leave a room. I pay the electric bill at home but it's included in the rent at work.

My home PC's are 4-5 years old and I have only had to replace a power supply in one of them. Not sure if that was related to turning it on and off every though.

Unless you're worried about the electricity bill or don't like the constant humming of the fans, there's really no point in turning the machine off. Machines can only perform while they are on, so having if off is just "wasting" the functionality of the machine.

At work, even the workstations (very very old machies) are left on for months. There's no harm in leaving computers on all the time, no maintenance required either.

However, an occasional reboot can help clean up system resources. My laptop is notorious for deciding to fart on me with indigestion. Thats when I hit restart and go to the bathroom, or get something to eat.

RAM RAM RAM!!

On. My machine at work has 58 days uptime right now. My one at home is 40-something.

That said, they're both Linux boxes. I reboot my WinXP laptop every couple days.

just dont shut it on or off constantly.

give at least 30 secs before reboot just to be safe on the hard drives.

some thinks like me, i remeber posting this on the old board.

well i turn mine off, i have had 1 problem with this i had to format my whole computer and it sucked. i still do it and it freezes on me but i still like turning it off.

working at HP technical support, the official word there is turning it on and off every day will create wear and tear... as well as use up more power. The variations in the power surges doing this cause wires to decay faster... but if you turn it off once a week, not so bad, turn it off less than that, better. The main concern is the monitor. Turning off the monitor every night can save lots of power, and will reduce the amount of decay of the phosphors on the CRT.

I turn off my comp maybe once every few weeks, and the monitor every time I will be away from for an hour or more.

Yeah just don't do it every day cuz I think it's hard on it.

I've been in the computer field for over 10 years and I've never seen any advantage to turning off the computer, except for power consumption.

I've seen servers that eventually have problems with components failing but I can count them on one hand. I've had situations where computers failed when I turned them off after being on for extended periods of time.

When do light bulbs burn out most often? Usually when you flick the on switch. This might be a poor generalization but I think it's applicable.

true, but physically shutting off the monitor every night is harmful to monitor components. people should use the software 'standby' modes and things like that for the monitor.

if i remember correctly from my A+ books, monitors will lose half of their brightness in their lifetime.

your damned if you do and damned if you don't, i guess.
heh

I've been turning all my computers off every night and firing them up every morning for over 15 years with no adverse effects. I have three systems at home and two at work.

Well think about this... you know how if you leave a glass of water in the freezer or outside in the snow it cracks the glass when the water turns to ice because the water expands? Same thing happens with your hardware, only on a smaller scale. Constant drastic temperature changes from turning your computer on/off all the time causes unnesessary (spelling?...)wear and tear on your hardware and can only cause problems in the long run. If you're not going to be using your computer for an extended period of time, yeah, go ahead and turn it off. But doing that on a daily basis can really kill your hardware.

So I shouldn't leave my computer out in the snow? But then how do I perform a cold boot? ;-)

This debate was started long ago, when the top of the line hard disks of the era would send the head crashing into the disk surface like a 747 into a field when power was turned off. That doesnt happen in these new drives today. and wear and tear on powersupplies? well, I dont know about that. Tell you the truth, if someone told me that shutting off my computer wears out my powersupply, I would just nod at them. :). I have a 386 machine that I bought new and I fired that up every morning, and shut it down every night, for the past, well, since it was top of the line. :) It still works fine. I replaced the Hard drive though. :)

Nothing is going to happen differently to your computer if you turn it off every night and fire it up every morning. Believe me. Hardware fails no matter what.

mine system's stay on 24/7.

I just have a quick question in that does restarting have any bad affect on the computer or is it just having all components lose power and than get it back? This is restarting as in start/shutdown/restart.

Just wondering as i restart my older comp which is on ME quite often b/c of system resources.

There are 2 types of reboot... a "soft reboot" which happens when you hit ctrl-alt-delete or select "Reboot" from windows start button...

the other type of reboot is a "hard reboot" which is done by hitting the reset button, or switching the machine off and then back on again.

I don't think there is too much difference in this anymore, unless you are attaching new devices to your machine.

... in older machines... I mean like 5+ years old, with old operating systems, it did make a difference as it was possible that some of the programs were still holding onto resources after a soft reboot.

X

Unix and their variants are made to stay on 24/7 because they were first developed for a server environment. I always leave my computer on and only restart whenever necessary (maybe every 1-2 weeks).

mine stays on 24/7 and runs seti@home too. no problems yet.

24/7 here, and I rarely have to reboot.
It's on a XP OS btw. (no issues)
The only time I turn it off is when I'm gone for an extended period of time,
like on vacation I'll unplug it.

I really don't think it matters all that much but I'm an on person. If it doesn't cause that much stress to leave it on, then why not?

Having an always on computer with an always on net connection has completely changed the way I think of my computer.

The Old debate once again, in the past is was concidered better to leave it on as alot of the chips were compression fit and heating and cooling would cause the chips to "creep" and loose connectivity at times causing a failure. Todays system do not suffer from that at all, I leave mine on 24/7 and shut off the LCDs when I leave the machine. To each his own, what ever spins your wheels.

on, since i leave emule on 24/7.

24/7. Need to get that huge uptime. Bigger is better.

This should have been a poll, but it seems like the 24/7 is winning. My vote; on all the time (both work and home).

I leave my stuff on 24/7 (unless someone decides to cut it off for me by wrapping their car around a power pole, or a tree hits a power line, or whatever :mad: ). Not so much out of concern for wear and tear, but remembering to turn it off before I go to bed and turn it back on when I get up is too much work. :p

I leave all of mine on 24/7, but the monitors are put into standby mode when I will be away from them for a while. I do this because I have more problems with corrupted programs when I turn them off every night. as for the power consumption, very little. I currently have 4 computers running constantly in the house, and the power bill went up a whopping $4 a month.

I reboot all my production NT servers every night. It seems to make them happy.

When I was running NT 4.0, it always seemed to be happier with a frequent reboot. I could never go\et Workstation to go for more than a week without hosing. Server was maybe a month.