I have my Mac Mini set to automatically turn off the monitor if unused for 10 minutes, and sleep if unused for an hour. I also have the lower left corner of the screen set as a “hot corner” to immediately turn off the monitor. It doesn’t need to be compulsively rebooted unless a security patch requires it, and if I recall, it consumes something like 3 watts when sleeping, so there really isn’t much to gain by powering down. It takes a couple of minutes to power up, but a couple of seconds to wake from sleep. If I’m going to be gone for a day or two, I’ll power it down.
Sometimes if I’m in a hurry I’ll Stand By, but usually I just press and hold the power button til my laptop shuts down. SB is ok if I’m going to be returning to the same place to turn on, hut standing by at the office, with docking station LAN connection and my desk printer, then turning on at home off the docker seems to make it angry and I end up with wireless authentication issues.
You mean, you just “pull the plug” on the computer? :eek:
You don’t have the OS turn the machine off?
That’s just begging for disaster…
I almost never turn off either my laptop or desktop. If I’m leaving town for a week, I might turn off the desktop. Otherwise, it’s always on.
Desktop and Laptop shutdown and powerbar turned off.
Desktop would use 40W turned off…
I found my Vista boots up really fast if I don’t have my USB external hard drive connected. Also, XP boots up way faster if the LAN is disconnected. Somone here could probably explain why 
Yeah, pretty much. On my laptop, pressing and holding the power button is slightly more graceful than ‘pulling the plug’, but only slightly. It shuts down the OS but doesn’t commit anything resident in memory to disk. I most commonly do this on Monday mornings when I’m trying to get out the door to work.
You’d think 12 years in IT would make me more careful, but it’s done the opposite. I’ve seen laptops/desktops/servers withstand so much abuse at the hands of end-users that I have come to believe Windows systems are way more sturdy and robust than any of us really expect them to be. The only time I’ve ever had a catastrophic failure was over the winter when my wife dropped a salad bowl on my laptop. My bad, I guess, leaving it on the kitchen counter.
Whoa, nelly! Deleted way late double post!
Common complaint from whom, though? My guess is people who don’t have enough RAM for what they want the OS to do. If you’re running the minimum, it’s going to run slowly unless you disable a lot of features, which a lot of people don’t know enough to do.
I shut down my desktop before going to bed (or before leaving work).
My laptop is set to hibernate when the top is closed. This setting (and the laptop itself 
) are left over from college, when I was working on projects and needed a way to quickly shut down the computer so it could be placed in my bag.
I never shut my laptop(s) down, or put them in sleep or hibernate modes. I’ve had laptops on for several years with no issues.
I shut down my desktop. But I don’t use it much anymore. I’ve got a new net book.
It really depends if I’m on batteries. XP has settings for both.
There are options to turn off the monitor, then the hard drives, then go to standby (I guess sleep) and then hibernate. I rarely truely shut down the netbook. I just let it hibernate after it shuts down the monitor, then shuts down the hard drive and then sleeps. Then hibernate.
Vista shouldn’t take long to start, if it does, assuming you have enough memory the most likely problem is too many start up programs or programs looking for updates on reboot. Adobe is notorious for looking for an update everytime you boot up.
I have five programs that auto start and when I installed all of them were set to check for updates when I booted up. I unchecked this option and it swiftly moves now.
For new computers it doesn’t matter much if you leave them on or turn them off. There once was a debate whether it was too hard on your hard drive to keep it spinning and such, but that has been take care of as drives are now made to be run all the time.
As for lightening strikes, having the computer on/off won’t make much of a difference if it is still connected. During a lightening strike if the computer is plugged in you can get damage even if it’s off.
Dial up modems are very susceptible to lightning so even if your computer is fine your modem could get fried. I’ve had dial up modems fried without the computer even being on.
I physically unplug mine during a major lightning storm. Minor lightning I don’t bother with.
The real debate was always on should you turn the computer off to save wear on the hard drive and keep it cooler and such.
We have four computers, two of them laptops, running nearly 24/7. Not even losing the power this summer bothered them… they are all plugged into surge protectors and APCs…
Good way to trash your files - if you have any unsaved files, they’ll be lost. And, any time you saved at shutdown will be reclaimed by a scandisk run while Windows sorts out the open files when you turn it back on.
As for the wireless authentication - we make a point of telling people to completely shut down their laptops, and have disabled hibernation via group policy as hibernation caused too many help desk calls. The main problem is the computer was running on our LAN and had a 10.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address. They go home, wake it up and it’s being handed something like 192.168.1.102 from their home network. The VPN software and WiFi management software then misbehaves because it thinks the computer is still on our network and won’t allow a connection.
I have never, ever, ever, in my extensive, nerdy life of computing had any problem result from a hard shutdown. Ever.
But usually I just leave my system on overnight to torrent. I’d say it runs probably 95% of the time - it’ll get shut down if I leave for a few days, otherwise it chugs right along.