So Which Is Better......Leave it Run? Or Shut It Off??

[Led]

I always have shut my PC down every night, but upon startup, the thing is just churning away for the first half hour. All the "startup" crap catching up on things.........

But after that, I cannot hear a thing out of the box! Should I just leave the dern thing on 24/7?? I know of PC's at the Factory I worked at, that ran for YEARS being on all the time!

Is it better to have the Computer go through all that "startup" crap every morning..........or just leave it run all the time???

Of course I turn off the monitor, when gone for lengthy times............but have been shying away from a total DAILY shutdown of late.............??????

[roadkill]

Back when I had a desktop I left it on 24/7 and only shut it down during thunderstorms for obvious reasons. I eventually went to a laptop and now an iPad. If I was to go back to a desktop I’d do the same thing again.

[Herr Walther]

When I used a desktop they were on 24/7. My laptop goes to sleep when the lid is closed, but it's not shut down.

[Noland]

I allow my monitor to go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. LCD monitors will degrade over time, especially the backlighting,

Everything else I keep on 24/7. I do not even let windows spin my hard drives down. I keep them going all the time. There are differing opinions on that but mine is that starting and stopping them multiple times per day is worse than leaving them running. I have an old Tivo at my mom's that has been running on the original hard drive for over 9 years. That is 9 years of actuall 24/7 usage. Tivos constantly read and write simultaneously to the disk regardless of whether or not anybody is watching them. I rarely see PCs with power saving enabled get that king of lifespan from a HDD.

The downside is electricity consumption if you are concerned about it. I am not since my bill is not out of line .

[jefferson101]

I allow my monitor to go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. LCD monitors will degrade over time, especially the backlighting,

Everything else I keep on 24/7. I do not even let windows spin my hard drives down. I keep them going all the time. There are differing opinions on that but mine is that starting and stopping them multiple times per day is worse than leaving them running. I have an old Tivo at my mom's that has been running on the original hard drive for over 9 years. That is 9 years of actuall 24/7 usage. Tivos constantly read and write simultaneously to the disk regardless of whether or not anybody is watching them. I rarely see PCs with power saving enabled get that king of lifespan from a HDD.

The downside is electricity consumption if you are concerned about it. I am not since my bill is not out of line .

If the difference between it costing $5/month to run and it costing $2.50 or so is a big thing to you, shut it down.

OTOH, I'll note that I've had about six computers go TU on me since about 1991. Four of them had switch failures and wouldn't turn back on.

The on-off button seems to me to be less durable than the operating parts.

FWIW.

[DaveBob]

When desktop sleeps is the fan running - does heat build up in sleep mode if not??

[Herr Walther]

Are you certain it is actually sleeping? Or does it go to sleep some minutes after pushing the button?

The fan should not be running during sleep. As soon as the power is suspended components start cooling rapidly.

[Led]

YUP!! I have been just leaving my PC run now. The only "restart" has been on "patch Tuesday" once or twice a month............seems like there has been TWO "restart" updates a month lately......???