bill@thomlex [0] bill$ uptime
12:22am up 142 days, 37 min, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00
I turn my work comp off every night before I leave. Dunny why just a habit I guess. I should actually leave it on and schedual it to defrag twice a week.
My home comp I never turn off. If I crash for whatever odd reason I am forced to turn it on… but that is about it.
Living with Mr Goo, who is obssessed with his SETI units count, none of our computers get turned off.
They may be rebooted (approx. once a week) but they must be continuously on 
Whenever it behaves badly and needs a nap. Which, luckily for me, often doesn’t occur for weeks on end.
ditto
Turned on when I come home from work, turned off when I go to bed.
Turn it off?!?! You’ve gotta be kidding! I might NEED it. And I can’t wait the four minutes it takes for it to start up.
Occasionally, I have to restart it, but I haven’t shut it down since Christmas when I went on holidays for two weeks.
Hell, I’m just the opposite of all ya’ll. I only turn mine on when I need to do something, then shut it off when I’m done. If I’m gaming, it might stay on for a couple of hours, or all day on the weekend, but it spends more time off, than on.
You should be able to sleep your computer; you are entitled to that functionality. Try to find someone who is knowledgeable about these things to troubleshoot for you, or even pay a consultant. It is really worth it for productivity and lack-of-stress to be able to access your computer without having to boot up every time or leave it on 24/7.
In my humble opinion.
I turn mine on when I get in from work and shut it down when its time for bed. I only do this now because it is set up in my bedroom and I can’t fall asleep because of the noise from the fans. When I had my house I would leave it running all the time since it was in the office on the other side of the house.
Same here. I do turn my monitor off, since it’s the real power hog, and we got used to doing that when our computers were in a smaller room. You wouldn’t believe how much heat even two monitors can generate.
At work I leave my PC on but I put it into sleep mode after I leave for the day. Over the weekend I usually have it shut off.
At home I leave my computer running and put it into sleep mode overnight and while I am at work. I usually shut the monitor off, too, since my cats sometimes hop up on my computer desk and trigger the mouse enough to re-awaken the machine, at which point it will remain up and running without reverting to sleep mode again. If I expect to be away from home for more than 24 hours I’ll shut it off completely.
I used to shut mine off at night, but my latest machine, a Gateway running Win XP, has a sleep mode that turns off the monitor, the hard drive, and even the cooling fans. In other words, other than the fact that the little lights on the faces of the monitor and tower are amber, instead of off, it’s no different from being off, except that tapping the keyboard brings it back to life (much quicker than booting, to be sure). It even wakes up if it’s got some scheduled task to perform (like doing a complete virus scan in the wee hours of the morning once a week).
Now, I only shut it down completely if I’m going to be away for a few days.
Off… you mean these things shut off?
Ours are all up all the time and they are all on the internet all the time.
We do have them sleep though so they don’t suck as much power when we are not at them. In my experience after being up like this if you shut them off for too long they don’t want to start again!
Im in California, it costs too much to keep it on all the time, so I turn it off at night. As the HD manf told me, in theory they last the same amount of time whether you turn it on or off, but in practice they last longer when you turn it off.
Turn it on when I’m ready to use it, and turn it off when I’m done. I can’t stand the “sleep” light blinking at me all the time. It’s like an ibook “Telltale heart”.
If I don’t turn it off at night, then the computer tends to act wonky the next day, requiring numerous reboots. The sleep function doesn’t seem to affect it much.
My iMac is always on, when not using it, I just put it to sleep. Same with the iBook I only do that because OS X is stable enough not to need restarted regularly, and sleep has the added benefit of being instant off, instant on. Plus since there are no internal fans in my iMac (its all convection cooling) when the harddrive spins down, the computer is completely silent.
The “telltale heart” takes some getting used to. The power button has a while light behind it, that slowly pulses when asleep.
Its almost like the computer snoring.
We both turn our computers on whenever we get up/need it first in the day, and turn them off right before bed. We don’t want to waste the power, and I doubt its doing any harm to the computers. Heck, if it DOES damage this computer, then I can get a new one! The router, when it was working, was left on all the time, but it was a 486 (I think) and the network cards died and we just haven’t replaced it yet.
Eh, I updated the BIOS on mine trying to troubleshoot some problems and it boots and is ready to use in about 10 seconds. I can wait.