Do you turn off your PC?

Karlsbad · May 30, 2003

I don't know, I used to never turn this one off, it used up a couple of fans lol. People used to say it was more wear on drives to power them up and down etc etc. Now I turn it off all the time, then again the disks thrash like you wouldn't believe, though I attribute that to the 2 year old installation of win2k.

Committed to excellence, willing to make do with high average, able to get by on mediocrity in a pinch.

jihiggs · May 30, 2003

i leave my comps on 24 7

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endyen · May 30, 2003

I always turn mine off. The new drives handle it better.The big plus for me is protection from hachers, but while the puter is off it is also safer from voltage spikes and might even survive the house being hit by lightning. It is a good idea to remember that if you have high speed internet you are open to attack wether you are surfing or not while you are on.

elzt · May 30, 2003

You can always set up a firewall, right? For me, I leave my PC on 24/7.

TKH · May 30, 2003

I usually power up my rig at 9.00am and shut it down around 1.00am to get some nice sleep, or else all those noise generated by my rig will keep me awake for whole night.

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soulprovider · May 30, 2003

I'd say any electrical appliance will eventually suffer from continuous power ups due to thermal stress - devices expand and contract when warmed and cooled.

I have 2 servers running 24/7 on my home network and I use these if I just want to briefly do something like read my mail. The rest of the machines are powered off until needed.

Vorsprung durch Dontwerk.....as they say at VIA

shadus · May 30, 2003

I never shutdown except for bad storms. I think my best uptime with windows 98se is ~7 weeks

My linux boxs rarely ever go down, I had one over a year at one point... shrug.

Personally, I've found my computers last 5-7 years of constant use if they are shutdown very very rarely before they will have any non-software related issues... if I shut them down daily they seem to last about 3-4 years... shrug. Moving them around is alot more terminal than turning them off and on.

Shadus

jihiggs · May 30, 2003

thats what firewalls are for

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Karlsbad · May 30, 2003

The turning point for me was when smart doctor on my asus GF3 said the GPU fan quit, when I looked inside I saw that the cpu fan was stopped too and I never knew it

Replaced all the fans, turns out that GF3 fan that according to asus was too expensive to ship without sending them the card because it's 'gold' has a life expectancy of about a week and a half lol. Finally bought some P1 fan from startech that is loud as hell but didn't burn out in under a month. Of course I haven't left the PC on since then.

Committed to excellence, willing to make do with high average, able to get by on mediocrity in a pinch.

Karlsbad · May 30, 2003

Post deleted by Karlsbad

Ryan_Plus_One · May 30, 2003

I would leave mine on but the temp in my room would would probably break 100F without the windows open lol.

Now that I am running RAID 5 I find myself praying for a hard drive failure.

Triple7s · May 30, 2003

I always shut it down after I'm done for the day.
No need to suck in dirt and dust for nothing.

Flyboy · May 30, 2003

I shut them down at the end of the day. I think it depends on what you use it for. If you don't run any kind of server, then shut it down daily. I agree with Endyen. Why open up my computer for hackers? I have a two layers of firewall protection, and I STILL like to protect my systems by shutting them down. And if I leave one running overnight, I enable the firewall LOCK to stop all traffic- Call me paranoid I guess.

dmcmahon · May 30, 2003

It burns a noticeable amount of electricity - I can see it in my bill each month. As a compromise, I do shut it down every night during the warm months of the year. But, I leave it on over the weekends because it's going to get a lot of use. During the colder months, I'll leave it running 24x7 - I figure the wasted energy is just going to heat my apartment, and since I have electric heat, I might as well get some additional benefit from the juice that's warming me. I do shut the monitor and speakers off whenever I'm away from the machine. As for hackers and voltage spikes, I have a firewall and a UPS/surge protector.

gaviota · May 30, 2003

I generally leave mine on 24/7. Windows XP can work for months without being shut down, so I only turn it off during electrical storms.
Anyway, it's generally in use either by myself, my wife or my son from 6:00am all the way to midnight. And it takes so long to boot that I prefer leaving it on all the time. We just turn the monitor off when not in use.

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jihiggs · May 30, 2003

ok, your paranoid.

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skligmund · May 31, 2003

I never leave mine off, if I'm not on it, it is running seti@home, just because I am ahead of 98.200 percent of all 4.5 million seti@home users. I turn mine off probably 5 to 6 times a week, usually because I am tinkering with it, or just have to restart because I try a new overclocking method or other bios change. I reinstall windows on an average of once every 2 months, even though XP handels the crap from windows just running WAY better than 98, I always have a better install everytime.

I am a firm believer in reinstalling windows on a regular basis, it keeps the old drivers gone and just plain refreshes the system (especially after all the crap I put it through). That is what the extra 5400RPM Matro 40GIG is for, saving all my windows install stuff, like drivers and documents and aircraft for MSFS2002PRO ect.

What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The same thing we do every night Pinky; Try to take over the world!

Flyboy · May 31, 2003

Yeah maybe, but I've never been hacked yet (knock on wood). My boss has a friend who lost data on EIGHT machines at his home. The real surprise is that the guy is an IT Administrator! If someone who knows their s**t really wants in, he'll find a way in. But he will have a much harder time doing it when my system doesn't run 24/7.

I'm so paranoid (in general), that I'm about to cancel my credit card for another so that I get a new 16 digit number. Its analagous to a dynamic IP address... I figure I'm at risk because I have had this card for over 5 years, so I'm ready for a new one.

Anyway, as far as leaving your computer on, I don't think it'll significantly reduce the lifetime of the components if you shut it down once every day. This is especially true if you consider most of us upgrade or build a new system every 3 years or so (i.e. so who cares if the computer lasts 4 years instead of 5)...

And I do agree about the electricity...my guess is that its equivalent to leaving at least 3 75 Watt light bulbs on if the computer is not in hibernation. If it hibernates, then I say the power consumption is negligible, IMHO.

jihiggs · May 31, 2003

hibernation is off. it just dumps ram to the hard drive and puts it back in ram when you turn the comp on. so basicaly nothing changes.

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KWPLunchbox · May 31, 2003

On 24/7. Besides, I've grown so used to the glow from the
fans and neon as well as the white noise that I can't sleep
when it's turned off.<g>

AMD XP 2200+, A7N8X Deluxe, 512mb PC3200 Corsair XMS DDR, Geforce3 Ti-500, Audigy Platinum, TDK 48x CDRW, Lite-On 16x DVD, XP Pro SP1, and more neon than a ghetto sled

codegoblin · Jul 8, 2003

I leave mine on, but I turn the fans down in RPM.
I have over ten fans in my case, one of them being a 92mm tornado. The noise reminds me of a server room and isn't the easiet to sleep with. Plus my desk is underneath my room mate's bed and not mine. I suppose if you had a water cooling solution the point would be moot execpt for the fact that you are putting hours on your pump.

Do you turn off your PC?

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