I generally keep my computers running all day every day, with the exception of laptops that I suspend but keep powered.
Do people actually turn off their computers when they are done with them each day? Do you hibernate or suspend, or power off completely?
If you leave your computer running all day do you think about power consumption? Have you changed your metering or electricity plan to suit?
Why would you maintain power to the unit… are you not power conscious?
I use it so infrequently now i actually turn it off at the wall when im done (like i used to laugh at my grandma for doing).
In a world of infinite power, that was free and had no impact on the environment at all, I would still power down my computer unless it had a task to perform while I slept.
Computers are basically lots of tiny transistors, some silicon, and metal. When you run electricity through them, they are slowly dying, chip death is a real thing.
If the computer is not running near to its maximum or minimum operating temperatures, the death is slowed but it is still happening.
Maybe you don't care, maybe your PC hasn't died yet, but you're taking a risk every time you use it, why elongate that risk for no benefit, other than maybe saving yourself 20-30 seconds when it gets powered on? It's not logical.
Power off your PC, please.
hahaha, losers down voting this, at least reply so people can see your illogic, amazing.
What you say is right, but there are cases when not powering down actually saves components mostly due to lack of temperature variance. Some nvidia laptop gpus used to die due to constant temperature fluctuation due to lid being closed and open. I remember a server that we shutdown and once we booted it up the hdd never spun up again.
Plenty of people say components die faster leaving the PC on 24/7, just as many people say they die faster when they have to deal with temp fluctuation being turned off and on over and over again.
Maybe both are right and it all evens out and the PC has the same lifespan both ways.
Most of my PC issues have been during the on/off cycle, i've been so burned by a past computer with chronic boot problems i still get PTSD when i have to turn my current PC off and on.
Modern PC's are so efficient the power cost is negligible, especially when you have solar.
Do you remember what the specific failure was? John's example, for example, is valid but fairly dated now, most modern systems aren't relying on a HDD, at least as the boot device, they're using an SSD.
Just FYI, it doesn't "even out" because they're both contributing forces to degradation, so they amplify.
It's more likely constant voltage will contribute to a shorter life span of components than normal powering on and off, unless you're powering on and off say 3 or 4 times a day regularly, a single power on/off for a total of 8-10 hours of PC use, in my opinion, is better off than 8-10 hours of usage and leaving the PC running.
Sleeping is constantly using power, it's less power but it's still running and booting from sleep in terms of impact on system life is the same as powering from off, additional power is send to the components to wake everything up, it just resumes faster.
Hibernation is useful if you have something that is in progress that you don't want to finish and save, but need to power down the machine, I can't think of an example but I'm sure there are use cases. This is 'exactly' the same as powering on and off though.
I hibernate my laptop. The typical laptop uses 2W in that mode. I think that my 6.5 KW solar system will offset that quite easily. And it’s basically the same amount of power that’s drawn when the PC is shut down.
Here’s my take:
Put the PC to sleep during the day.
Hibernate overnight.
Some further reading: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/should-you-hibernate-or-turn-…
I shut mine off when not using it
don't want people to find my incriminating files
I just mean files
On 24/7 for Plex multimedia server.
Always sleep my PC over night, costs a fortune if you don't. Seriously, probably more than all the lights in your house put together.
My server (on 24/7) was carefully spec'd to be as low power as I could reasonably get at the time.
Leave it on during the day if you're using it, sure, but I don't see why you wouldn't turn off your PC before you go to bed?? What's the logic behind leaving it on? Sounds like just pure laziness…
It's not different to leaving on your TV or game console. If you're not using it, why leave it on?
I leave mine on 24/7. In 20 years I've never had a PSU fail, no matter how shitty (although I buy quality ones now) but I've found people who shut down or sleep thier PCs have PSU failures a lot more, but it could just be that those are the PCs I'm passing down to them with 3+ year old PSUs.
I power down every day. Sometimes when you run the pc without stop, it gets some weird errors eg memory consumed goes through the roof.
It is not about power consumption. My pc behaves better when I shut it down. You know why they say have you turned it off and on again? 😉
Something I wonder about is if you use a liquid cooler these have a guaranteed lifespan on average of about 5 years. If you leave the computer running all the time it could mean more wear on the pump. Not sure if this would result in more permeation or not, but something to be aware of I guess if you want to run your PC 24/7.
I power of my desktop if am not using it more than an hour. It's all SSD so boots up faster. Good for the environment. Other things I do, we use oven only once in a week or once in 2 weeks - I switch it off at the mains. Microwave, TV, router are powered off at night and powered on in the morning. - You need to be careful when powering off components that might up updating itself in the middle of the night on standby.
Always hibernate my desktop and laptop (on lid close) to save power and so I can almost instantly resume the tasks I was doing. Everyone should enable Hibernate in the Start menu/power options settings, instead of using Sleep! It's better for your battery/power supply, the storage and the RAM. It is the exact same as Shut down, yet saves what you have open to the hard drive. No power is consumed.
I do a power cycle every week, including when I need to do updates, to clear the memory and ensure software errors are avoided. When my desktop isn't in use I turn the power supply switch off.
Actually hibernate does a dump of your RAM to disk before powering off. Depending on how much RAM you have in use this can put physical load on the system. If you have a spinning disk then this means head wear. If you have SSD then this means storage wear (SSDs have limited write cycles).
Going into and resuming from sleep also causes storage wear. Either way I'd rather do that to my SSD instead of draw power.
i use a shortcut to shutdown using a timer, it also lets me listen to my podcast and fall asleep without having to wake up to stop it
C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe -s -t 2900
Why 2900? Not 3600, not 3000? You are killing OCD.
if i have trouble sleeping my podcasts last about 40mn, at least like that i dont have to get up to extendit if i want to listen to the end.
not sure what killing ocd is but i'm sure its fine
3 x servers are on 24/7 (2 x unraid 1 x xigmanas), but most spinning disks have 1 hour power down.
1 x desktop PC set to sleep after 1 hour (but allow NIC to remain on to do NIC based backups overnight)
Yes every day. I schedule a task to have the PC shutdown at about 11.30pm so its all automated.
This site helps if anyone is interested in setting it up for themselves
https://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-10/how-to-automatically-shu…
Please do the planet a favor, turn off the appliance that is not in use.
Turn off computer. If too slack to turn off then get ready to terraform another planet
I have recently experimented with an Intel NUC which draws bugger all power due to the mobile CPU they use. Can draw as little as 8 watts so pretty good.
At $0.24 per kWh, each watt of standby/24/7 on power costs you about $2 per year
That is: 1 / 1000 x 24 x 365 x 0.24 = 2.10
(Obviously this changes if you have solar and/or battery storage, although you don't offset cost when the sun isn't shining and battery storage has its own ROI maths to work out)
This is quite convenient from a maths point of view once you know what the idle power of each device is
The 3w idle Raspberry Pi costs you $6 a year to leave runinng 24/7
The 10w idle NUC costs you $20 a year to leave running 24/7
The 100w idle PC costs you $200 a year to leave running 24/7
This is also why dedicated low power hardware for NAS/mediaserver duties are worth it, because the power savings alone can justify the cost (if the PC wasn't going to be on anyway). Also the environment etc.
Getting a cheap kill-a-watt meter or smart plug with energy monitoring (eg. TP Link HS110) can help you figure out what the true idle power of your devices at the wall plug is.
No need to keep them on nowadays with an SSD. Takes 10 seconds to reboot and no wasted power. Although idle PCs use less than 50W so it's not that bad to leave on.
Do you power off your computer?
Sometimes.
shut down, gen4 nvme drives are dumb quick
So I have had my Intel NUC8I5BEH3 I5 8th gen on a smart plug with power monitor for the last 10 days, power use in total 2.1 kWh (PC only).
Will cost me less than $20 per year in electricity.
I haven't put the screen on the power monitor as yet but looking at its power rating I guess it would be similar.
I've been leaving it all the time and never really power it off lately. Yes I do think about the power consumption and often think I need to power it off to save power.
Every now and then I turn it off for a while or restart to give it a break as I feel bad.
power button configured to hibernate + 15 min idle hibernate