I’m sure this has been asked before, but please indulge me. I’m have beginning to intermediate computer knowledge and I have been told that it is good to never turn you computer off because it keeps it from extra work booting up. However, I have also been told that it is best to turn it off at night because the wear and tear of leaving it one exceeds that of the rebooting.
Assume that there are no security issues at stake or anything like that. Which is best, on or off, and why?
Turn it off or hibernate it, and better yet switch off at the socket too. Somewhere between non-existent and almost non-existent extra ‘wear and tear’ during boot up on modern computers. It’s just wasting energy.
Link to turn off computer or standby?
I leave mine on. I think they generally don’t mind idling as much as they do the temperatures changing. But, I don’t think it’s too important either way, so if you have a separate reason (like it’s in the bedroom and you don’t want to hear fans or see LEDs) you should feel free to choose on that basis.
I’m sorry, but that’s simply arrant nonsense. You don’t leave your TV on all day because you worry about the thermal expansion and contraction that takes place. If it were in any way true, these failures would be common, and they aren’t. This issue has been considered in the design and occurrences are frankly non-existent. I can only assume it’s some myth being secretly propagated by your energy supplier.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both. I personally leave mine on all the time just because it’s a pain in the ass to wait for it to boot up in the morning. It’s been running strong for a few years now after very rarely being turned off. 
If I know I won’t use my computer for more than a 24 hours, I shut it off to save electricity and money.
My electric utility company’s charge is 15 cents per kilowatt-hour. My PC (with monitor turned off) consumes ~120 watts. That works out to be about 54 cents per day. (It’s actually a little more than 54 cents per day because the heat dissipation from the PC also has to be carried off by the house air conditioner working slightly harder.)
For me, it’s easy enough to flick off the power switch to avoid spending 54 cents needlessly and apply that money towards a Starbucks coffee.
The “wear & tear” (if any) of the PC by shutting it off & on does not cost more than the 54 cents in electricity savings.
I actually have 2 computers in my office, therefore it’s more than $1.00 a day if I leave them on doing nothing.
Sleep/hibernation is a possible alternative to completely shutting it down. However, I personally don’t use that mode because it’s not reliable for my purposes.
If you turn it off, your computer will not be taken over as a “zombie” by some worm/virus. Also computer security updates are behind the attacks, so you have an increased chance of an attack occurring before the update. The chance is slim, but still there.
However, if you turn it off- be sure to let your security system finish upgrading before you start surfing.
I don’t think the comparison with televisions is valid. Modern TV sets are never “off” unless you unplug them. They use a trickle current to keep the circuits warm and avoid the dreaded “mismatched CTE” fatigue (i.e., warm-up/cool-down stress cycles).
But I agree that it doesn’t really matter much. Whatever you do, most PCs will be obsolete long before they wear out. It really comes down to which you prefer to avoid: the few moments it takes to boot up in the morning, or the few pennies it takes to keep it running all night…TRM (who leaves his on 24/7)
It makes a difference when you think globally.
Those “few pennies per night” add up to BILLIONS of KWH annually - equal to the output of several large power plants.
I think these recurring religious arguments should be in Great Debates.
Tris
How does sleep/hibernation introduce unreliability?
I didn’t mean “unreliable” in a hardware failure type of sense.
I meant unreliable for in my usage of software. For example, I have VPN tunneling software and VMWare virtual machines. Hibernation often breaks my virtual software network bridge and the VPN can’t reconnect – which means I have to reboot the whole box anyway to get things working again. Well, if I’m forced to reboot the computer anyways… I might as well… shut it down.
Also, a friend of mine has a HTCP with Windows Vista Media Center. When it is in hibernation, it does not reliably wake up everytime to record her show. If the computer stays on 24/7, the shows record but hibernation is hit or miss. Also, the Sony TV hooked up via HDMI to the computer’s DVI often stays blank after hibernation wake up and no key combination (even Ctrl+Alt+Del) will bring up the menu. The only thing that works is to do a hard reset or cycle the power. I don’t know if the hibernation issue is caused by the motherboard BIOS, the NVIDIA graphcis card, or the Windows Vista software, and I don’t care at this point. I just know it’s always triggered by trying to wake up after hibernation.
And then there’s the hibernation headaches with my laptop which is another paragraph…
There are two schools of thought on this.
No one has ever come up with a convincing argument that one is better than another. Leaving it on will use more power, of course (even worse if you have an old CRT monitor), but as for how it affects the operation and life of the computer, it shouldn’t make a great deal of difference.
I maintain that, in my experience, computers left running have been less likely to develop noisy or faulty fans than computers that were shut down when not in use. I always leave my computer running for this reason (3 years in, no faulty fan; meanwhile both my parents have toasted their CPUs trying to run their computers after the fans started getting noisy. Anecdote is data!). Whenever I post this, several people counter that they have observed no correlation between fan death and regular shut downs, but I remain convinced that there’s a link.
My home computer’s been running 24 hours a day for 4 years now: obviously all is well.
I guess Al Gore didn’t get to you huh?
Don’t get me started with Al f*****g Gore!
I’d be interested if the type of computer (desktop v. laptop) makes a difference. Though I suppose, as someone pointed out, overheating is more likely if you keep a laptop on than a desktop.
ETA: What evidence, if any, is there that booting up a computer from “off” mode results in any significant amount of “wear and tear” as opposed to leaving it on?
I’m sorry, but don’t call this arrant nonsense without understanding where it comes from. One of the issues that have been considered in the design is the expansion and contraction of air inside the hard disk drives, which causes their internal air to gradually mix with external air, drawing vapors into the drive that wouldn’t otherwise be there and can ruin the critical head lubrication. Many people have spent many years considering this exact design problem, and I am one of them, with several patents to boot. Occurrances of hard disk drive failure are frankly not non-existent. Ask around how many people have had a hard disk drive fail, and how much of a hassle these occurences are.
I’ve had two hard drives fail this year - and both were a big hassle.
However, I don’t chalk these failures up to power cycling. The idea of extending a computers life by running it 24/7 is dubious, at best.