leaving your computer on 24/7 better for it, a myth?

My computer is so powerful, I always shut it down at night because I'm afraid if I left it on without my keeping an eye on it, it might become self-aware and try to take over the world.

Seriously, though, I've seen studies about that issue (leaving it on, versus frequent turn-ons, turnoffs) and they were inconclusive.

Personally, I'm more concerned about the possibility of a fan bearing burning out in the middle of the night and something overheating, so I turn mine off when not in use.

As long as you always let it sit for about 30 seconds or so before turning it back on, you should be OK. The worst thing you can do to a computer or any other electronic device is to turn it off and then immediately turn it back on.

Good question Dude

My experience in the "solid state electronics" industry shows that the majority of SS device failures occurs at initial power up as in "da' SOB was working yesterday, but when I turned it on this morning it smoked and croaked!"

I have several servers that run 24/7 ... worst thing that has ever happened is a CPU HSF or case fan (sleeve bearing) would begin to squeal, necessitating replacement. I never had a ball bearing fan fail yet, and the sleeve bearing failures I've had never "locked up" the fan rotation, just made a "really gets your attention" noise.

So, either choice you make, on/off or 24/7, "works". The issue as I see it is power consumption and heat generation versus convenience or necessity.

Turning it off overnight would probably be worth it. If you're going to the store to buy milk, going to a class for a few hours, etc... it probably wouldn't be worth it. I tell the people using the technology at where I work to turn their computers off for holidays breaks, vacations, and weekends and to otherwise leave them on over-night.

Shutting a computer off not only saves electricity, but it stop the hard drive and fans from spinning, which are some of the big failure points, the wear-and-tear parts.

So to recap, I think you'd really be fine either way, but to save power and wear and tear you may wish to shut it off while you sleep.

I'd do it to preserve my HDD life, but then again, that's me... not to mention my comp is damn loud and I'd rather sleep with it off (because it's next to me at all times!)

Otherwise, I really don't see much of a difference. Mechanical parts will eventually wear off, but since the MTBF is a million hours or so, nothing to really worry about... usually...

I leave my computer on 24/7, I started to turn off at night in about a week a stick of ram went bad. The ram was 1 year old and had been overclocked and voltage increases also. but when it failed its was running at spec. Now always on

I personally subscribe to the theory that heating and cooling cycles are the most stressful thing for these devices.

Even a HDD motor is going to be stressed more constantly spinning up and down than by running continually.

Plus I like to be able to connect to the PC remotely from anywhere and for it to instantly "be there" when i come to use it.

Monitors however, I tend to let turn off. TFT CCFL back lights have a limited lifespan, and CRTs lose sharpness and brightness with age

lmao thats the best answer anyone could have ever given! lol

Well i was under the impression that everytime a computer is shutdown there is slight damage to the hard drive... the needle skips?

I guess i never really tried to findout if thats the case...

Hmm

... lets get someone who knows their stuff in hereI think that was back in the old days.... The reason for having to "park" the heads before shutdown.

you just brought back memories of dos 5 and windows 3.1 with having to type in park at the prompt before shut down

IMHO, on or off 24/7 is just a matter of preference and economy/budget (excluding extreme environments). Almost all PC components for the last five to ten years have been designed to withstand temp cycling caused by warm up and cool down associated with power up/down.

Hard drives have had "auto-parking" for the heads for about the same time, when a drive is turned off the heads automatically park on an area of the platters before they have a chance to damage the area where data is stored.

So you have to ask yerself "Do I want to leave my PC on all the time and incur bearing wear and the cost in electrcity to run it, or do I want to have to wait for it to boot if I shut it off?"

Electrolytic caps in the PC are about the only thing that will dry up and fail, as some have seen, a failed cap can fail "explosively". As long as the covers are on your CPU there is usually no personal danger unless it catches fire.

All depends on how you use your pc. I run scheduled tasks at night, i.e. backups, defrag, etc.. If you dont have a need to run tasks on your pc in off hours, then shutting it off wouldnt hurt it. Every environment I work in is 24/7, so everything is always on. I don't want to wait for mine to boot up, so for me i'll pay for the extra electricity.

I think it's a personal preference. For my build, if I wasn't so customed to leaving my computer on, I'd turn it off. Main reason, since I've built this rig, my room temperature has actually increased! The thermostat is located in my room and gaming on it for about 2 hours will keep my room about 75F. Let's put it this way, so far, since it's gotten colder outside, I've ran the AC more than the heater!!!

I never had this problem with my AMD Athlon 64 3200 (S 754), which didn't have Cool n Quiet enabled and was about just as loaded as my new build.

*shudders*

Might just be me, but I'm personally blaming the heat on my ATI X1900XT!!!

It's winter... what's cheaper? Running your computer or the heater?

Then again, depends if you care about the other rooms getting cold

I dont know much about this admittedly but I do know two things

1. Leaving it on all the time will almost certainly knacker your fans quicker

2. Leaving it on is a total waste of electricity and for that reason alone you should definitely be turning it off at the very least at night, if all of us here at THG did that maybe we could save a few square miles of Ozone

To add to that, for the people that don't regularly clean their cases/fans/components, dust buildup will accrue much faster.

Very interesting that only one viewpoint has been presented here thus far (granted an important one). Another thing you should be taking into account is one far more nafarious... leaving your computer turned on and plugged into the internet leaves it open for any hacker to plink away at it while your on a hot date with Mr. Sandman.

To me, computer security is a tad more important than a few measely dollars on equipment that may or may not give out in the near future, equipment that costs you a few hundred dollars, maybe. Far worse is the aggressor on your network/computer trying to get your information.

Without going into details, I have penetrated many networks and wrenched passwords, account information, and general user control away from the rightful owners... all thanks to poor security practices (like leaving your computer running all the time). I have set up zombie networks of computers (like many of yours) and could have used this bot-net for malicious purposes. However, I did not, and was acting under lawful contracts to access network security.

I assume most of you won't listen; it's a difficult battle for anyone in this field because we sound like a bunch of possessed lunitics, religiously raving and ranting about. "Oh, they're just being paranoid!" "What a naysayer." "This doesn't really happen as much as they say." "What are the chances of me being hit?"

I've heard it all.

A word to the wise... but to the wise only because fools won't listen. Your identity and data are more valuable than a worn-out chipset fan.

Well I don't really mind if I get hacked because it's not like I have anything of value on this computer. Oooooh, my Gmail password. Whoop de frickin' doo. I can understand that this is much more dangerous for those who buy things online, or have research on their computers (though hopefully they're more stringent about their security) but I don't really apply to that rule. The once in a while that I do buy something online with my paypal account, which isn't hooked up to a credit card, I made it so that I have to phone my bank and confirm with them that I am buying this.

I keep my computer on at night because I run things on it at night, like defragging, virus scans and folding @ home. Also, I've grown accustomed to the noise of my computer and sometimes have a hard time sleeping with the lack of gentle whir.

Also, I live in a place where electricity is dirt cheap, and no where near as harmful to the environment as most places. I live on an island in southern BC, Canada, and all our power comes from a nice big hydroelectric dam somewhere outside of Vancouver. Power is around 5-6c/kwh, so it's not like I'm breaking the bank by leaving my computer on. For others, this is not true, but I like being an exception once in a while.

I'm sure I'll replace all, or most of my components before they become damaged by either problem. I'm soon going to replace the tricool fans in my computer with nice silent, high flow fans, and with the airflow in my computer, as well as the cooling solution in general, I can have any fan fail and be able to turn on my monitor in the morning and it'll be fine, though the only one that I would be the least bit worried about because I might not notice, is my vga fan. it runs at 25 percent except for when I'm gaming and it idles at 45, so as long as I don't try to play oblivion on it with a dead fan, I'm fine.


*edit* I had forgotten to mention that since I left my computer on 24/7, I have never had to turn on the heat in this room, and it stays actually 2 or 3 degrees warmer than the rest of the house, which I like my room to be at.

Tell this to Google, Time-Warner, and M$. Along with just about every other large corporation. :-)

I agree, that hacking stuff is a bit freaky. I think that most of the ideas posted here support shutting down systems when not being used within a few hours.

Heh, well they already have anti-hack firewalls that detected snooping. Maybe they should hook the whole internet up to GPS and send out a mini-nuke? Call it "You're F'n dead hacker mofo"...or something. :-D

If you kick a computer hard enough, it will reboot. I used to have a system that misbehaved often, and I found this out on several occasions. Long story short: I live in the Hot Summertime South and when the air conditioner breaks then none of the electronics enjoy being pushed. I eventually took the comp in to my local Best Buy (under warranty) and got a replacement because the overheated components eventually rendered it useless.


But as far as turning of the comp at night? I do every night because I don't like the whiny fans next to my head. When it was in the other room I would only turn in off every few weeks to use night time for long downloads and/or defragging. I suppose it mainly depends on your personal habits.

I always cut mine off at night personally. But I work at the Pentagon and the computers there are never turned off, they do patches and upgrades at night so all the computers must be left on. I have worked electronics for the last 25 years and I don't see much difference either way. I do believe you will probably use enough electricity leaving it on to more than pay for any component that might fail by power it off. And if you are going to leave it on make sure it is protected against power surges and storms.

Here are a few things that might help add to your debate:

Advantages of leaving the computer on 24/7
1. Rotating parts (hard drives and fans) last longer if left on continually rather than cycled on and off. Starting up rotating objects is far harder on them than just leaving them on.
2. Your computer can be used to do certain tasks if it's always and reliably on- e.g. function as a router, home server, web server.
3. Your OS will accumulate less in the way of startup/shutdown logs and general cruft that comes from starting up and shutting down.
4. Things in your OS get loaded into RAM after enough accesses, speeding up subsequent accesses of those programs and making them run faster.
5. You never have to wait for startup/resume to use your computer. If your computer is particularly poky to boot, resume, suspend, or shut down, you'll save time by always having and leaving it on.

Disadvantages of leaving your computer on 24/7
1. If your OS and setup is not very secure, leaving your computer on 24/7 just makes it that much easier of a target and you very much increase your chance of getting a network worm or just plain hacked.
2. Memory leaks can develop over time, eating up RAM and sacking performance.
3. Running your computer 24/7 does use more power than shutting it off.
4. More dust gets sucked up in your computer as the fans move more air than they would if they run for less time.
5. If your computer is not very well cooled, running it for an extended period of time can lead to hot spots and accelerate the demise of certain components, particularly hard drives.

So here's a few things that you need to ask yourself:
1. Is your OS and software up to the task of running 24/7? If you have memory leaks from the OS or programs that get pretty bad after a day or two or get just weird behavior after it's been on a while, perhaps it's better to just shut it off at night to get a fresh reboot each morning. If your computer could seemingly run forever without a reboot and run fine all the time, feel free to leave it on.

2. If you have a permanent Internet connection, is your computer secure enough to more or less be a sitting target for an extended period of time? Dependent on the OS, network, and protective software setup you have, this may warrant looking into or it may not be an issue at all. I'd recommend that you at the very least be behind a router or other NAT device with a hardware firewall for any OS and have a resident antivirus/antispyware program if you're on Windows.

3. Is your computer well-cooled enough that running it 24/7 won't bake a HDD or the system? This one should not be too hard to find out if your computer has hardware monitoring sensors. Just leave it on and watch the readings after a day or so.

4. Is the computer noisy and if it is, can one sleep through it if they can hear it from their bedroom? I have seen computers that sounded like hair dryers that unless there were two floors between me and it I could not sleep through their noise. Loss of sleep sucks.

I personally leave my system on 24/7 as it's a cool, quiet, reasonably well secured machine. It acts as a file, print, and terminal server on my little network and lives behind a router. I have it run Folding@Home all the time, so something gets done with the idle CPU cycles that I don't use when I am sleeping or gone during the day. My OS is more than up to the task of running for extended periods between reboots and seems to respond the same 2 minutes since restarting or 2 months since restarting. My machine can't suspend to disk or RAM very well as it's setup not very compatible with doing that. It does not boot very quickly and I have to be there to enter a couple of passwords at various points during the startup. So for my case, it's a no-brainer to leave it on 24/7, but most people probably would do better to shut them off at night.

Oh, and before I forget- ALL LAPTOP USERS SHOULD NOT LEAVE THEIR COMPUTERS ON FOR EXTENDED PERIODS OF TIME. You WILL cook your machine and slowly kill things in it, especially hard drives. I know this from experience! Laptops have HORRIBLE cooling and are really designed to be on for a short time and the CPU and HDD powered off, whether it's shut down, suspended to disk or suspended to RAM. The insides of them will very easily get to be 50 C or more after a few hours of use, and even though the CPU and chipset are especially designed to withstand being run at those temps for a long time, hard drives and other ICs are pretty similar to desktop ones. They really cannot run that hot for extended periods of time. They can only take it for short time periods and then they start to die on you.

EDIT: Also anybody who OC's they computer should shut it off at night too. Especially if it's a particularly high OC with a fair amount of Vcore bump. That makes a ton of extra heat and if the Vcore is enough, you can get electrometallic migration to trash your chip if it's high enough and you run it enough (cause of SNDS.)

And to an above poster, Raptors do not necessarily run all that hot. My Raptor 740GD is always between 27-31 C, which is not hot by any means. It just sits behind a 1500 rpm 80mm intake fan and that's enough. If I put it in the top of the computer behind the DVD drives, then maybe it'd get hot as there's little airflow up there, but the intake fan does its job.

All excellent thoughts here.

Savings vary, since the price of electricity varies by more than 50% throughout the USA alone. And don't confuse idle current draw with PSU ratings.

Since I tend to write in the apparent context of the question, my reply was geared toward home users. Businesses and idiots like us whose houses are heated not by gas or oil but by CPU, are another case entirely!

SOHO arrangements are frequently peer to peer, everything gets turned off at the end of the day and hopefully it all works in the morning. If something breaks it's not the end of the world because there's another computer with most of the stuff on it, and hopefully someone had a backup. With any luck, maybe it was even recent 8O

Small/medium sized business will be using, or should be using, a more client-server oriented arrangement. There's a server or two or three in a closet somewhere, humming 24x7, and the PCs on the office floor still get shut off at night. Since the servers are where all the critical stuff is hosted, losing a workstation should not be a show-stopper. Sometimes the servers host email or FTP services, all the more reason they can't be shut off. Sometimes not, but it's not seen as worth the trouble to shut the boxes down overnight for a few hundred dollars a year in savings, particularly when a server outage can cost thousands of dollars in on-site service and business interruption.

Large business are quite the extreme case. You can have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of servers and clients. Hopefully the users turn off their stuff at night, though some will try to work around existing processes and policies by leaving it on, connected to GotoMyPC or something. But the servers are where the action is, and now with the world revolving around the Internet and international markets, you end up with complicated dependencies that make just sequencing the server start-ups an impossible task, never mind the risk of business interruption if one morning a SQL server decides it doesn't want to boot up. So business that size will have huge rooms full of servers, and gobs of AC to keep 'em cool, and enormous battery banks and generators to make sure they keep humming 24x7. The waste is staggering.

Thankfully with products like VMware, the unbelievable CPU glut we now enjoy can be better put to use. Consolidation is the name of the game right now, in the quest to save on maintenance and power costs.

-Brad

I Leave My PC On 24/7 UNLESS, Im Upgrading It, Cleaning It, Or Am Gonna Be Gone From My House For More Than 24 Hours, Because I Am Alwayse Using It Throught The Day And If Im Not My Roomate Or Friends Are And I See It Pointless To Shut It Down If It Is Often Being Used, Plus I Use The Idle Time For Software Updates And Downloads, I Keep My Power Saving Settings On A Perfect Balance Of Conveinence And Energy Efficiancy, When CPU Usage Is Below 25% For At-Least 30Minutes Or On Standby And The Case Temperature Is Less Than 90F I Have It Set So That The CPU Fan, Videocard Fan And All But The One Exaust Fan Automatically Stop Spinning (3 Out Of 4 Case Fans) Plus I Have The System Power Down My TFT After 1HR, Go Into Standby After 2HRS, The Hard Drives To Spin Down After 4Hrs And Hybernation After 24HRS Of Non-Use.

I work with PC's that run non stop, 365 days a year. Most common failures are PSU's (caps running dry), VRM around CPU's (also caps running dry) and then memory (due to short circuit caused by dust). These PCs fail faster than a normal PC, based on minimal maintenance or care.

Due to the move to fixed caps, as opposed to wet dielectric caps, the possibility of running a PC for longer, non stop becomes greater. Only considerations are clean case and acceptible temps that is constant in their context.

The biggest electronic killer though is temp and humidity fluctuations. With a change of 4% humidity or less per hour, one can actually form micro condensation, which may cause a short on components with high density pins etc. Luckily, inside a case temps and humidity rarely varies by the above criteria.

Nice work bumping a thread from 2006.

BSOD thats a driver issue. Maybe you should update your drivers. Mine does not give no BSod i leave on 24/7.