Keeping computer turned on

[silverdj]

Do most of you guys always leave you computer(s) turned on all of the time? If I leave mine on for more than a few days straight it seems to be running a little sluggish, I was just curious if it mattered or not that you don't turn them off? I guess maybe if I upped the cooling on my rig it wouldn't seem to hurt it.

 

[Lord Evermore]

If you had a hardware problem "sluggishness" after a few days wouldn't be the result, you'd just crash, sooner rather than later, or you'd notice artifacts in 3D games, or corruption in the hard drive. (Although if a P4 overheated, it would reduce its clock speed and seem to be running slow.)

It's easy to determine if heat is a problem. Take the side off the case and aim a small household fan into it with a decent airflow speed (box fans do nicely but even a small desk fan will work if it's on high).

It sounds like maybe you've got something with a memory leak running, or perhaps some malware. You can look at Task Manager and see if anything in particular is sucking up CPU time or memory. There are some bugs which result in the service host process running at 100%, which might be occurring if a particular thing happens every few days, like a time sync.

Does the problem go away if you reboot? If so, then it's software, since nothing in the hardware would change drastically during that time.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

From a component standpoint, it is unknown if keeping the computer on is better for the components than turning the computer off every night. From a performance standpoint, if your computer is not that good, then you probably would do well to turn it off every night. Mostly, it just depends on personal preference.

 

[w00t]

I turn off mine everynight unless I am downloading or forget/fallasleep

 

[Craig234]

I normally keep mine on all the time for years.

The other day on a whim I turned off my ~10 year old monitor for the day, and it wouldn't turn back on.

Sheesh.

 

[neutralizer]

Hibernate.

Sluggishness seems to imply memory leak of some kind and it runs slow due to lack of RAM.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Originally posted by: Craig234
The other day on a whim I turned off my ~10 year old monitor for the day, and it wouldn't turn back on.

At my previous job as a field tech, I did support for a regional supermarket chain. Each store had from 6 to 15 CRT screens on the registers. After like 10 years of just leaving them on continuously, they decided to start shutting them down at night. We ended up replacing probably half of all the monitors at every store within a few months due to them being dead after they shut them off. All of them of course had the store's retail screen burned into the screen horrendously.

 

[Geomagick]

I used a system as a firewall for a while and it ran fine for months at a time.
In fact it usually only got rebooted when someone removed its plug from the wall by mistake.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore

Originally posted by: Craig234
The other day on a whim I turned off my ~10 year old monitor for the day, and it wouldn't turn back on.

At my previous job as a field tech, I did support for a regional supermarket chain. Each store had from 6 to 15 CRT screens on the registers. After like 10 years of just leaving them on continuously, they decided to start shutting them down at night. We ended up replacing probably half of all the monitors at every store within a few months due to them being dead after they shut them off. All of them of course had the store's retail screen burned into the screen horrendously.

i guess sorta like how a lightbulb dies on its last startup? heh pop!