Leave Computer On or Off?

[Joanne B.]

I use my computer off and on almost every day. Is it best to turn it off at night or leave it on all the time? I've asked different people and get all kinds of answers. Also, if it is left on should I leave the monitor on or turn it off when not in use.

I thought maybe y'all could give me a reasonable answer.

 

[jm100dm]

Everyone has their own opinion on this. My wife and I just turn the monitor off when we retire for the night and shut down when we are not going to be home for hours. Most businesses leave on 24/7. Your choice.

 

[Davey7549]

Joanne
As JM mentioned you will get all kinds of opinions on this subject so I will give you mine. I insist on all our computers at home to be shutdown when not in use for two reasons.
1) Conserve electricity, since the Electric company has enough of our money.
2) If the Power Supply or another component were to short out I do not want a fire.

Again my opinion.

Dave

 

[Jtoast]

I turn my computer off at night simply because I don't want to listen to the fan.

 

[phoneguy55]

since we have a cable modem and the connection is always up (firewall locks down Net after 1/2 hour of inactivity though) and 2 high school kids, 1 college kid, my wife and myself all trying to get a turn on the thing, we have decided to leave it running 24/7 . The monitor goes off after 45 minutes of inactivity, so to go online means touch the mouse, click on firewall icon to unlock Net and start browsing.
The old Gateway has been purring along like this for almost 4 years now.

(sidenote...in severe lightning storms unplug system AND phone line whether it's left on or not)

 

[Del]

I turn mine on when I get home from work at 10:30pm, leave it on to I leave for work the following day about 1pm. I turn off the monitor when I'm going to be away from it for more then an hour or two.
My wife never turns her's off. Just the monitor when she goes to bed. Both have worked fine for years like this.
We do unplug everything during an electrical storm..

 

[Cowboy622]

When I went to Cable Modem I was leaving it on 24/7 but it got to the point where it would freeze when I would reboot. I could never clear the cache completely without rebooting so now after leaving it on for over a year, I've decided to shut it down about 2or 3 a.m. when I go to bed and fire it up at 7:00 a.m. when I wake up. That way it backs up the registry, gives the CPU a chance to cool down, and clears the Cache so my resources are up and surfing is faster.

 

[WhitPhil]

Cowboy has made an important point. If you don't boot your PC regularly, Windows is not taking a Registry backup.

Even if you take a backup manually via Run > Scanreg, there is no guarantee that the registry backed up will actually boot the PC, if restored. The odds may be low, but it is most likely well worthwhile to periodically do a shutdown/restart to ensure the integrity of the registry backups.

 

[phoneguy55]

well , you are right about that. My teens put this old PII through it's paces. While listening to a cd, with MULTIPLE IM windows cascading, all on top of a Word Document they are working on, and OE set up to check mail every 5 minutes in the background, I find that I just reboot when it's my turn to use it, just to bring things back up to speed.

We are spoiled though, at having the Internet available immediately without having to wait for anything to load.....we use it for a quick dictionary reference or as a phone book or a movie or TV guide.....which we wouldn't do as readily if we had to wait for a full bootup.

 

[~Candy~]

Originally posted by WhitPhil:
Cowboy has made an important point. If you don't boot your PC regularly, Windows is not taking a Registry backup.

Even if you take a backup manually via Run > Scanreg, there is no guarantee that the registry backed up will actually boot the PC, if restored. The odds may be low, but it is most likely well worthwhile to periodically do a shutdown/restart to ensure the integrity of the registry backups.

WhitPhil, are you trying to say we don't have to reboot once a day anyway It IS Windows, afterall

 

[slipe]

My main reason for leaving it on is that I use it at odd times and don’t want to wait for it to boot. Another reason is that I have a decent amount of RAM and don’t want to dump my vcache which speeds things up – especially opening programs.

There isn’t much chance of your affecting the life of your components either way. They will probably be obsolete before you wear them out whichever way you choose. I’m just willing to pay the extra energy bills to have the computer always handy.

I definitely would not leave the computer on unattended if I had an Athlon processor and did not have a MB with auto shutdown for overheat. If the fan fails you can toast the processor – especially if you schedule maintenance tasks for odd hours. P4s have built in overheat protection.

I do shut the monitor off though. It will go for weeks without having problems, but I reboot every several days.

It takes about ten seconds to type scanreg in the run box and back the registry up – a lot faster than booting on my old computer.

 

[Joanne B.]

Thank you all for your insight. I was just wondering if things would keep working longer if I wasn't switching the computer on and off every day.

 

[HuskerDu?]

You hit on the only real PRO I can think of besides convenience of ALWAYS ON, the reduction in stress on components like HDs and monitors. Keeping those hard discs spinning is a good thing in my opinion, ditto the monitor - the sudden burst of energy through a monitors gut when powered on is DAMAGING, same as the initial burst of power needed to spin up a hard disc.

Let it run.