yabedude

Leave it on. Configure it to use the power saving features. Powering up several times a day is hard on the bearings. My 2-cents.

RED 85

i used to leave it on 24/7 and now i don't have it and am borrowing one. i lost my M/B and Video card because i left it on and it overheated do to leaving it on and other factors like video card too close to another card, all fans went bad due to dust even though i cleaned every few months so i say turn it off when you turn in.(sleep).

X-AWDriver

24/7 here too.

flobadon

24/7 on all four machines. I participate in the folding@home project and having them on all the time means they're always working at full load for the good of science. If you're not doing anything with the computer, you don't get any benefit from leaving it on 24/7. Might as well turn it off and save some electricity, though typically an idle PC isn't using much juice. Better thing to do is to participate in a distributed computing project like folding or SETI@home.

My main machine is in my bedroom, and I also had to invest in a quieter enclosure/fans to ensure I could get enough sleep at night. There is just something awesome about a quiet-running PC.

I'll also verify that Win2k/XP systems can run much longer than people who automatically assume Microsoft makes inherently unstable OSes. I've had uptimes of a few months on XP systems before with no instability/performance degradation whatsoever.

data

all of mine stay on 24/7

jimrockford

Mine are up 24/7 but for different reasons than mentioned already. I have Automatic Updates and disk defrags both set to kick off while I'm sleeping.

Plus, one of my systems is tied into my home theater setup and I occasionally like to watch a TV show or movie or listen to music saved on my computer. It'd be pretty inconvenient to have to turn the system on every time I wanted to watch something.

fork

the more i shut it off the more the damn thing breaks. stupid windows

edit: ok elaborating.
i run a couple maxtor arrays. raid 0. yes it is sketchy at best lol - the more i shut them down the less reliable they are in the future. ive found this out from running maxturds for a long time now. but theyre cheap and easily replaced..

as for cooling, i found a nice server case sitting next to a dumpster one day and what do you know -- a perfectly fine case. so i brought it home, sanded it down, painted it black, and here it is. and even more odd, i was in the garage painting it and the previous owner stopped by and gave me all his old paints.

I positioned all the hard disks and power supply on the upper half of the case, and isolated them from the lower half. this keeps the cpu/motherboard/video card MUCH cooler. now I run about 5 fans total, which is less than half what I was running in my old small cramped case. it's much easier to work on as well. my cpu used to idle in the mid 40s (celsius) and now idles at 30-31 consistently. at load it doesn't even hit 45. Of course this is all relative to my setup too. i guess ill post the specs so you can compare, since this is not the average home pc but more of a workhorse

amd3700 1mb l2 @ 2.2ghz
2gb (4x512) pc3200 @ 200 (ddr)
7800gtx OC (for the pretty graphics. im never buying a top-of-the-line video card for the rest of my life after this one lol)
8 maxturds. they vary in size, but are all either 250s or 300s. I lost count though
2 smaller western digitals, and a seagate external (for important things)
all juiced by a 750w psu. and it took me a while to find a psu that could handle this. with power saving enabled, it's not too bad on the electricity bill. but i run torrents 24/7 so it keeps the disks spinning. it also does a really good job of heating my room lol

spaceycayce

My Slackware 11.0(Linux) P/C I leave on 24/7. It likes to run for long periods of time. It doesn't hog resources like Windows likes to do. My Laptop doesn't like Linux and I need to run Windows for school, so I shut it down at night due to heat issues.

Elton

i leave mine all the time and turn it off once a week at night

89macrunner

Exactly. Although there are constantly new viruses and spyware, hackers, out there to get you, leaving your computer on constantly allows it to update in the middle of the night without bothering you. If you turn off the computer, it wont update untill its scheduled to, or you tell it to update. Setting it to boot on startup can prevent this, but it will really lengthen your startup time, creating more inconvenience. Allowing it to defrag your hard drive(s) durring the times you arent using is convient as well.

All of you are correct in that windows does need to be restarted every once and awhile during a crash or update.

For my desktop since it is my room and a tad bit loud, First thing I do in the morning is turn the computer on and the last thing i do at night is turn it off.

My laptop 12" ibook G4 is never shutdown. I havent shut the laptop down unless the battery goes compltely dead, which has happend maybe 4 times in the 2 years ive owned it. Macs have a great sleep feature. I can close the laptop and it goes to sleep. Sleep uses little to no battery life and generates almost no heat. When I open the computer it starts instantly from the place when I close it.

Since im no the topic, here are some laptop battery tips.


Let me start off by saying that I have had my laptop for 2 years and I still have the original battery in it. I have spare that is newer but it rarely gets used.

I get an average of 4 hours on my battery depending on what im doing with the laptop. I can get 5 with the Wifi off and the screen dimmed.

The day i got the laptop i turned it on and let the battery die completely, dead enough so that it will not boot. Than I charged the battery to 100% and repeated this process about 5 times.

Since than the laptop is only charged when I get a low battery warning till it gets to 100%. Than i use it till it dies, and repeat.

This has allowed me to keep my battery for 2 years without any issues.

If you like to keep your laptop in one spot and leave it charged in TAKE YOUR BATTERY OUT!!!.

I work at best buy and everytime a customer asks me for a replacement battery (which we dont even sell) because they are getting 20-40min of battery life, I ask them if they leave their laptop charged constantly. 95% of the time they say yes. It just isnt good to let the battery sit there and charge constantly like that. Sometimes if I am editing some DV or audio i will leave the laptop plugged in for an extended amount of time. The battery ALWAYS comes out.

In addition, If you leave your laptop plugged in almost 100% of the time, it is beneficial to charge and discharge your battery atleast a few times a month.



Well im out of things to say.. haha

Lysmachia

I leave mine on all the time but reboot once a week just to keep the updates fresh. As server jockey's like to say... when in doubt... Re-Boot! (That's usually the easiest fix to a wacky anomoly)

misterzee

question 1. "How often do you like to replace your computer?"
question 2. "What kind of special deal does your electric company give you?"
.. sums up my philosophy .. I build em, fix em, usem every day.

Paul H.

I shut my desktop off every night for the last 7 years and have not had hardly any problems. The only thing I have replaced is the CD drive. My laptop goes into sleep mode when I shut it and I turn it off once a week.

fork

disabling my page file had a pretty good effect on windows stability. windows is pretty stupid with memory management in that it will start pushing to a pagefile even if you have over 1.5GB of unallocated ram..

wes1977

I leave all my computers running at 100% cpu. I'm doing folding at home for team landcruisers. Landcruisers rank We are about to brake into the top 2000. Oh yeah haven't had any computer problems yet running them hard.

One of my computers runs an FTP server and I have another hosting some web pages.

Yota Tony

I leave mine on all the time.

rubysRunner

I usually leave mine on for days. I have it set to hibernate after 2 or 3 hours, and my monitor shuts itself off after 1 hour. I only ever turn it off if I'm not gonna be home for a day or two, or occasionally I'll shut it down when I go to work.

jsnby

leave it on. then, schedule your virus protection software to do an update and full scan every night at like 4am.

if you have multiple hard disks, write a backup script to physically copy your important files to the other disk so you have a physical copy of the files on another piece of hardware. I have all my music (40GB), pictures, videos, all import documents, "My Documents", etc.

With how cheap disk storage is these days, there's no excuse not to back up.

If you're tech savvy, instead of doing a copy, you could install Cygwin and do an rsync so it only copies the files that have changed.

My backup script runs once per week, so if one of my drives gets hosed, I've only lost a weeks worth of data.

jsnby

You could also run a web server on your box and set up a dyndns account and never have to use free hosting for pics ever again.

da_bigg_wigg

Waste of power in my opinion. I'll turn it on when I get home from work usually to pump some tunes, and shut it off when I go to bed. The fan points directly at my head while I'm laying in bed, so no dice. It's a laptop with a 2 stage fan, so every couple of seconds the faster fan will kick in. You don't notice it when you are using it, but I don't think I could fall asleep to it.