How long do you keep your desktop on??

[Joecheng]

Is there any pros or cons of keeping it on 24/7 besides the obvious convenience factor? I normally keep mine on 24/7 but i have heard rumors that it can be damaging to my parts. Plus, the electricity bill has jumped almost 20 bucks in the past month. The beauty of living at home as opposed to dormitories . . Is it time to change my habit of leaving it on 24/7?? I have tried adding a poll but dunno how to get it to work. oh well.

 

[JetBlack69]

I leave it on 24/7 because
1) I'm running a distributed computing client (more work done for the team)
2) Convienience
3) I've heard that powering it on and off can have more wear and tear on the hard drives and fans than on 24/7 (but that is a very minor point)

 

[pirred908]

Computers have moving parts and eventually those moving parts will stop moving. The longer you leave it on, the quicker you run the life of those moving parts down. I personally only have mine on when I'm useing it. Theres no point of leaving it on if your not useing it, unless your running some type of application like Prime95 fo example. Make sense?

 

[Anubis]

never turn it off

SETI
always downloading someting
always playing music, even in my sleep

 

[n0cmonkey]

I ph33r that my scsi drives won't turn back on, so I just let them run.

 

[jdiddy]

Originally posted by: Anubis
never turn it off

SETI
always downloading someting
always playing music, even in my sleep

Same here

 

[NokiaDude]

I let mine take a "break" every so often during the night. But most of the time I have it on 24/7, I use it too often to turn it off.

 

[Pandamonium]

The rumors to which you refer are still debated today the last time I checked.

One side posits that leaving your computer on 24/7 causes more wear and tear on your components.

The other side suggests that the power cycles themselves are surges in the circuitry of your components, which will degrade said circuits over time.

It's really a toss-up between the two as far as the average user is concerned; and nobody has conclusively proven or disproven either side of the argument to date. Your parts will likely become obsolete before failure becomes a serious issue. (Honestly, think about all the "spare parts" you and nearly every other AT'er keeps around...)

If you like the convenience of an always on computer and don't put too much faith in the wear and tear argument, you could consider a PSU with active PFC. That should reduce your electric bill a bit.

 

[Thor86]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I ph33r that my scsi drives won't turn back on, so I just let them run.

LOL. I hear you on that one.

 

[BG4533]

My HTPC ran for 68 days without a restart once. My main desktop normally runs 24/7, but it is summer and a bit warm in my room, so I have been turning it off to keep the room temp down. It is amazing how much this thing can increase my room temp.

 

[Yanagi]

WHat I've been told is that powering on/off alot will eventually tear your harddrives.. so I try to powercycle my comp as little as possible. dont leave it on 24/7 nowadays though. electricity is kind of expensive here in ireland :/

 

[muppet]

leave it on all year 24/7
probably not advisable, but servers do the same thing so why not?
the hardware in servers is obviously better

i constantly downloading, so thats the main reason
use a good power supply

 

[Stlr23]

I turn my puter off when I'm not using it. Mainly for PG&E purposes.

 

[eno]

First thing I do in the mourning is power them on.
Last thing I do at night is power em off.

I look at like a car. Freeway milege , constant driving/running = less wear per mile but still wear. You run a car for 300,000miles on freeway and it will start breaking down just as well as a street stopNgo (on/off)driver . Sure the on and off person will most likely get more wear per hour of usage but its not on twice as much as the constant PC.

Maybe a bad example but I just think not to let them hard drives spin down more than once a day, so thats why I leave em on full power during the day and shut em off at night. Unless program scans or defrags... etc.

 

[sharq]

24/7 except for during very severe thunderstorms.
The main movable part that would be affected is the harddrive. Considering how cheap hd's are available for currently, I don't see how that is a big problem. I just backup regularly.

 

[eplebnista]

24/7, running FaD DC client(see Sig below).

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: muppet
leave it on all year 24/7
probably not advisable, but servers do the same thing so why not?
the hardware in servers is obviously better

i constantly downloading, so thats the main reason
use a good power supply

Servers are on 24/7 for a specific reason, generally being that they are mission critical, and have users connected to them or are performing tasks at any point in the day.

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: Joecheng
Is there any pros or cons of keeping it on 24/7 besides the obvious convenience factor? I normally keep mine on 24/7 but i have heard rumors that it can be damaging to my parts. Plus, the electricity bill has jumped almost 20 bucks in the past month. The beauty of living at home as opposed to dormitories . . Is it time to change my habit of leaving it on 24/7?? I have tried adding a poll but dunno how to get it to work. oh well.

If you want to leave it on--so be it. If you want to pay the extra $$$ on power then that is the choice/compromise you make.

Your components in your PC have plenty of duty cycles engineered into them where turning them on or off or leaving them on 24/7 is fairly insignificant. How many parts in your machine are not upgraded after three years?

I leave mine off most of the time, though it usually runs 24/7 over the weekends. Beats the extra 15 to 20 bucks a month on power which comes out of my pocket.

I find that there are plenty of dorm room dwellers and Mom and Pop dwellers here that don't give a crap about power consumption and what come out of their pocket. $20 is a round of beer for your friends.... and its $240 a year my friend.... which will pay for a new Mobo, or HD, or Memory.... etc.

And while power prices do vary from region to region, $20 bucks is an accurate price based on my own observations of having run my PC for months at a time before.

If you must run 24/7 then set your power management settings aggresively, and that should help on the power bill substantially.

 

[WackyDan]

Go figure what I found on CNN's site this morning.

CNN article on leaving PC's on or off

 

[Tostada]

pirred908: You're ignoring the other side of the argument. Leaving your computer on 24/7 will wear out the moving parts, but that's just the bearings in your fans and hard drives, which is a very small part of the machine. As a matter of fact, if something's going to break, you want it to be the fans or hard drive, because fans are the cheapest part of the machine, and hard drives are the only part that should have a 3-year warranty (OK, I'm exaggerating ... nobody wants their hard drive to fail). Turning the machine on and off, however, will cycle all the electrical components, causing them to heat and then cool, which of course causes them to expand and contract, which is the primary way for electronic components to wear out. Look at an incandescent light bulb, for example. If you leave a light on 4 hours a day, it will burn out much sooner than a bulb that is left on 24/7.

WackyDan: You must think you're pretty smart to make such an obnoxious condescending post like that, but unfortunately you don't know what you're talking about. You're grossly overestimating the amount of power that a machine uses. The average person is paying $0.07 per KWH for residential power. If your machine is actually using a full 250W (which is isn't, unless you've got an overclocked machine on a 500W PS with more than four 10K drives), that would come out to $0.42/day, or 12.60/month. The truth is that your average computer, monitor included, will use less than $10/month of electricity. I personally had an electric bill under $30/mo several times in a studio apartment when I wasn't using the air conditioning, and that was with two computers on 24/7, a TV and a full-sized refrigerator.

 

[Pollock]

Originally posted by: eno
First thing I do in the mourning is power them on.
Last thing I do at night is power em off.

I look at like a car. Freeway milege , constant driving/running = less wear per mile but still wear. You run a car for 300,000miles on freeway and it will start breaking down just as well as a street stopNgo (on/off)driver . Sure the on and off person will most likely get more wear per hour of usage but its not on twice as much as the constant PC.

Maybe a bad example but I just think not to let them hard drives spin down more than once a day, so thats why I leave em on full power during the day and shut em off at night. Unless program scans or defrags... etc.

Same for me. Why not turn them off if it saves some on the electric bill and they won't be doing any good? I mean, it only takes 30 seconds to boot...

 

[DarkKnight]

I turn mine off at night and during the day when I'm not using it. My 30 and 60gig drives are over 3 yrs old and powering up and down did not damage them. I doubt turning off your computer will cause any damage because computer manufacturers know that most people keep their computers off when they arent using it.

 

[DrMoe]

I agree with the info in Tostada's post. Your computer should not be using that much electricity. Probably the majority goes into running the monitor anyway, so just set your monitor to power down when the system is idle. I leave my machine on just about all the time.

 

[robcy]

Compromise. Leave it on 24/7 at set it to shut down the HD's and turn off the monitor (suspend/doze/sleep/whatever) after 30 minutes of non-use. That way its always available for use, and you do not have to worry about "did I shut down the puter". I have one that is on 24/7, and one that I only turn on when I want to game since it makes enought noise to wake the dead .

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: Tostada
pirred908: You're ignoring the other side of the argument. Leaving your computer on 24/7 will wear out the moving parts, but that's just the bearings in your fans and hard drives, which is a very small part of the machine. As a matter of fact, if something's going to break, you want it to be the fans or hard drive, because fans are the cheapest part of the machine, and hard drives are the only part that should have a 3-year warranty (OK, I'm exaggerating ... nobody wants their hard drive to fail). Turning the machine on and off, however, will cycle all the electrical components, causing them to heat and then cool, which of course causes them to expand and contract, which is the primary way for electronic components to wear out. Look at an incandescent light bulb, for example. If you leave a light on 4 hours a day, it will burn out much sooner than a bulb that is left on 24/7.

WackyDan: You must think you're pretty smart to make such an obnoxious condescending post like that, but unfortunately you don't know what you're talking about. You're grossly overestimating the amount of power that a machine uses. The average person is paying $0.07 per KWH for residential power. If your machine is actually using a full 250W (which is isn't, unless you've got an overclocked machine on a 500W PS with more than four 10K drives), that would come out to $0.42/day, or 12.60/month. The truth is that your average computer, monitor included, will use less than $10/month of electricity. I personally had an electric bill under $30/mo several times in a studio apartment when I wasn't using the air conditioning, and that was with two computers on 24/7, a TV and a full-sized refrigerator.

"obnoxious condescending"??? I was no where near that. Have another cup of coffee and wake up. Sorry if it came off that way, but I find a lot of people who are advocates of leaving a machine on are also those who don't pay the utility bill.

Just laying it out there. I've lived where power was much higher in cost - again, I stated that power cost will vary by region. Where I live in the south is much cheaper than living and paying for power in the North East, where I used to live. You can use averages all you want to argue your point, I use my power bill.

This is very much like one of those MAC Vs PC, AMD vs Intel, Nividia vs ATI debates that will never reach a common dialog.

You only made one assumption that you were right on... I am pretty smart.