Electricity usage

[mickeddie]

My older computer is a server that never goes into sleep mode, even though I do NOT use it as a server, just a home PC. With electricity rates going up in Pennsylvania I wanted to find out how long should I be away from the PC to make it more cost effective energy wise to turn it off than to just let it hum away in semi-sleep mode.

 

[rockyjohn]

Are you saying that you don't have an operating system with sleep mode or hibernation?

I don't think you will find any hard and fast rules about when to turn off a computer. I think there probably still are a few die hards left from when a significant percentage of users argued that you should never turn off a PC because the potential damage from truning it off and back on - either a short term "acute" electrical occurrence or the long term impact on the system - was greater than the energy savings. Some bragged of having their PCs on for over a year without ever turning them off (I don't know if they made exceptions for required shutdowns related to upgrades).

For awhile. I kept mine on all the time, then decided that was ridiculous and started to turn it off at night. Now I also shut it down if I am going to be away for a few hours or more. I have owned PCs for over 20 years , 5 of them so an average of about 4 years each, and, for the most part turned them off when not in use, and have never had any electrical issues, even though most were what people call the crap PSUs found in store bought systems. But of course this is all anecdotal info and maybe some computer engineer can better enlighten us.

Note that I leave my printer and monitor on all the time, although both have a deep sleep mode so they use little power. I understand this is recommended with monitors and with the printer it ensures not having a real long warm up cycle.

 

[mickeddie]

Thanks for you answer. What I forgot to mention was that this computer is rarely used - maybe once every few days, if that.