NEED ADVICE: should I keep my computer on 24/7 or no? and why?

[Maverick2002]

basically i just built a new system, this one going in MY room and i have the freedom to do whatever i want with it

what i want to know, is should i keep it on 24/7 or not and WHY?

i have heard rumors about turning off your computer too many times can cause permanent damamge in the long run, whereas keeping it on will shorten component life

so what is right and what is wrong? plz tell me...
-THX

 

[CurtOien]

Keep it on 24/7 and join Team AnandTech SETI@Home.(or any other AnandTech team)
If it's on all the time it stresses the components less with heating and cooling. Ever notice how most lights burn out as you turn them on?

 

[Maverick2002]

cool thx ill consider joining..........

any more reasons/suggestions/arguments, etc?

 

[Wah]

even if you do keep turning it on and off, I doubt you'll own the computer long enough to see any adverse effects.

 

[Maverick2002]

hhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....................interesting......well anything more SPECIFIC? thx

 

[CurtOien]

This is a topic brought up on a regular basis in the distributed forums and the general consensus is to leave it on.
I'd say virtually all the guys doing distributed computing leave them on as much as possible.

 

[Topochicho]

I've thought about the same thing myself and the only component that worries me my Harddrive. They're rated for so many revolutions and thats it. Moving parts wear out, its a law of physics. So I think the "always on" thing is ok as long as you set your hard drives to power down, I'm not absolutely sure that helps, but I am to impatient to wait for the machine to boot up.

 

[Syborg1211]

i personally keep my system off when i am not using it. I do think that leaving it on will tax your fans and computer compaonenets, but that is not my excuse for turning it off. I think that leaving your computer on, esp. with your monitor on too, will waist a lot of electricity and raise power bills greatly. I know my dad finally noticed how much he was paying extra for power since i built my first computer.

 

[CurtOien]

Syborg1211,

You can set your HD and Monitor to go into a low power mode.

At that point even if your CPU is working at 100%, you're using as much electricity as a couple of light bulbs at the most.
In the summer that adds to your cooling bill but in the winter it takes away from your heating bill.

 

[Madcowz]

edited b/c of flaming

 

[thirdkind]

Topochicho,

Even low-end hard drives have an MTBF (mean time before failure, I think) of 100,000 hours of operation. That's over 11 years.

Let your hard drive spin.

Madcowz,

How much crack did you smoke today? I run a multimonitor setup with two hard drives, external Zip, and a bunch of other crap, run my system 24/7, and my electric bill TOTALS about $35 a month.

Give your crack addled brain a rest dude

 

[Pocatello]

See? It all even out .

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Better to just let your hard drive keep spinning. Takes more electricity to spin it up than it does to let it keep spinning, and it also causes more wear and tear.

 

[Soccerman]

". I don't know if your parent's care at all but I'm guessing you can save as much as $100/month depending on how much you use your computer if you turn it off when your not using it. "

how expensive is your electricity.. we're talking about 100 to 150 Watts MAX when your computer is on. you should be paying pennies per Kilowatt hour. KILOWATT HOUR, not WATT hour.

that means that if you have 1000 WATTS flow in an hour, you lose a few cents. now personally I don't know how to calculate even a lightbulbs power consumption (in terms of killowatt HOURS) but I'm pretty sure your computer doesn't consume much. it's like leaving your lightbulb on all the time.

during startup theres a jolt of electricity to get all the devices moving, so you spike quite a bit.

of course theres also the expanding and contracting that takes down electrical ciruits (if you turn em on and off alot, that's how lightbulbs normally go!).

I don't understand this though, you guys should be running RC5! what's keeping you! it's just a little program that is harmless to you and your computer!

BTW, could someone teach me how to calculate kilowatt/hours?

 

[optoman]

I did a quick calculation. My electric bill is 11.068 cents an hour per kilowatt. I assume that my computer uses 150 watts an hour which gives me 1.6602 cents an hour to run it. That is without the monitor on. This is ruffly 40 cents a day or a $145 a year. Humm...that is actually quite alot of money when you think about it in the long run.

 

[CurtOien]

Madcowz,

$100/mo.????

You don't pay the bill do you?

There is no way it costs that much unless you are getting robbed.

I don't spend that much on all of my bill and I have a lot of things that go all the time around here.

 

[BigToque]

Most of the time, my system stays up 24/7, but when I know I'm not going to be using it, and my parents arent using theirs (I'm the server for net sharing), I'll just shut mine off to help cool my room down a bit.

I honestly dont think it matters if you powerdown every night, or turn it off once a week. You'll replace your parts before they get dammaged from turning them on and off each day.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Leaving it on won't wear out any components within the amount of time that you're likely to own the system or actually put any of the components to use in any way. Only if they're already defective could it possibly do that, or if they're cheap and aren't designed to last long at all (sleeve bearing fans for instance).

Turning your computer on and off a few times a day also won't cause it stress to any degree that you would ever see a failure, unless something was already failing or defective. The expansion from temperature differences is minimal, not enough to cause extreme stress (perhaps using a peltier or extreme cooling may be enough to cause mild stress, but still, if you're doing that, you're not likely to be using the machine very long anyway).

The amount of your electrical bill increase from running a computer all the time is minimal, but it is there. I think someone once calculated it based on his rates and it came out to like 5 dollars a month. For a place like my house, that's a lot but it's spread across several people, we each have one computer (4 total, I'll soon have 2).

It all depends on what's worth it to you.

By keeping it on all the time, you have a greater chance of breaking the RC5 code or decoding the message from aliens with SETI@Home; you don't have to wait for it to boot every time you want to do something quick; you can run things like Napster and stay on AIM or ICQ all the time (if you have an always-on connection). However you also have to pay the extra electric bill and put up with any fan noise or hard drive noise (yes I can only think of two bad things about it).

By turning it off at night, you save a little bit of electricity and you can sleep without the constant hum of the fans and drive(s). But you also lose the RC5 and Seti@Home decoding time; anytime you want to do something after having shut it down you have to wait for it to boot again (can be annoying when you wake up in the middle of the night); if you turn it off more often, like whenever you're away for more than half an hour, it gets even more annoying to have to wait for it to boot just to do something quick (or even just when you want to do something NOW); you have to wait for things like AIM and Napster to load and connect; you don't get the constant hum of a nice big computer that you built yourself.

 

[mikepeck]

Leave it on and Join TA RC5 team. More details at http://www.anandtech.com/rc5.html. With your processor running at 100%, it would take around 75 watts at most if you let your hard drive spin down (less than a normal 100watt lightbulb)... And the hum is kinda soothing....If electricity isn't a concern.. then leave it on.

 

[Maverick2002]

on thing i forgot to mention thats VERY important: we dont have a set electricity bill (we live in dorms on the university of cincinnati campus), in other words, i can use as much power as i want to

ok, now that thats out of the way, i dont mind the spinning sound, as i have gotten used to it and feel "naked", if you will, when my PC is off

now if i WERE to keep it on 24/7 (looks like thats what ill be doing unless i can be convinced otherwise), is it worth it to do the whole standby thing? because it does lower my CPU temperature about 20 degrees F????

-thx

 

[Lurch]

Using optoman's 11.068 cents per Kilowatt, I figured out that just my database computer costs me $31.88 a month in electricity. (Based on apc's web site load calculator it uses 400 watts an hour. .4 kilowatts*24hours*30days*$.11068=$31.87584) Someone correct me if my calculations are incorrect please. That being said, the fact that you live in a dorm would bring me to say leave it on and crack away as long as your room doesn't get too hot.

 

[squirrel dog]

I used to keep mine on,now I cut it off,to conserve energy.I have the rig set up on a power master,where I can cut the monitor off with out pushing in the switch,as well as the cpu.Unless you have a need for it to be on,cut it off.If every computer in the world was cut off after use,there is no telling how much power would be saved.

 

[OS]

I say turn it off overnight if you aren't going to use it. It's kind of wasteful, and if everyone took the attitude, "well electricity is cheap" then we'd only be adding more greenhouse gases to our sky. No offense to the RC5 people, but RC5 doesn't really benefit people in anyway and I seriously doubt that continually turning computers on and off damages them. I could see SETI as being almost justifiable on the other hand, but I personally wouldn't leave a computer on overnight for seti.

As for computer lifespan, look at the aging fleet of 2/3/486s out there that home users turn on and off several times a day and yet still run fine. I've never seen a computer have it's lifespan shortened because it's been turned on and off repeatedly.

 

[Maverick2002]

any more ideas?

 

[subman]

I live in the tropics and I avoid leaving my computer on for more than a few hours. The ambient temperature is around 32 - 35C and my P3 700@868 can get mighty hot. I have used computers since my first PCXT I built in 1983 and have always powered off if I am going to be away from keyboard for more than a couple of hours. In all these years I have yet to see a component fail due to the powering on/off of the computer (except for the SMPS's power switch ). Never had a hard disk failure - I use only Seagate drives.

I am absolutely fanatical about power management and having the computer in Stand-By mode after 10 minutes of idle time to keep the computer cool. I use an ASUS P3B-F MoBo and an ASUS Geforce DDR display card and I find only the ASUS 3.75 drivers let ACPI function properly on my system. All the ASUS and Nvidia 5x and 6x drivers lock my system when coming out of a Stand-By.

And by-the-way my electricity bill is about US$225 per month.