with my current setup, im lucky if it starts after i turn it off, so i just leave it on while im here at school, i do turn off my monitors tho, unlike my roommate... another story......



when im to be gone for an extended period, ie more than a week, i unplug my surge protector. its easy for me to leave it on here, as i dont pay for the electricity in the dorms. now at home i turn it off, every little bit counts.


now theres been great debate on whether its in the best interest of the computer. one side says that the constant thermal expansion and contraction of turning it on and off is bad. others say that you need to let it cool down and rest.

basically, if one shortens the life more than the other, it would not be noticeable by you. it would probably be in the 10's of years, and the average computer life span is 5 years for compatibility reasons.

 

compatibility reasons? hmmm....don't tell that to my 400MHz celeron that I've got running Redhat 9.0 on. It seems happy enough. I've had that box running for almost 10 years now.

 

but for most people, especially in the last few years, those machines with 98 on them dont cut it in terms of usb devices, etc. but thats a different discussion for a different thread on a different day...

yea, its fine to leave on constantly as long as it stays in the operating temp. and doesnt exceed it.

 

I leave all of my desktops (4 of them) on 24/7. Some get rebooted more often than others. My wife's still has the Dell loaded O/S, she won't let me touch it and it gets rebooted rarely. I have a Dell from work that has a custom image of XP on it, very unstable and gets rebooted every couple of weeks. I just rebuilt my DVD burning computer in a smaller case and have to run the fan at a higher setting. That gets reimaged, using Ghost, every few weeks as I am to cheap to buy the ripping programs and use the 3 week trial versions. My main computer is a Dell XPS 410 that I wiped and installed XP and Vista.

On all of them I turn off the hard drives after 1 hour of non use, and the monitor after 15 minutes. I have killed a few fans, but they are cheap and easily replaced even in power supplies.

 

i would just use sleep mode. You don't have to worry about all that rebooting.

 

Mine's on 24/7, but only because I'm downloading constantly. XP Pro boots quickly when you have a dedicated drive. I keep all my files on other drives (and partitions) so the OS runs faster. This helps immensely when rebooting as well. Boot up and login time only takes 20-30 seconds.

But if I happen to leave for the weekend, I usually shut things down.

 

I have a desktop computer upstairs that has been on for over 2 months straight. Nothing wrong with that.

 

I used to leave mine on 24/7 for about 8 years, the only drwaback is replacing the fans and hard drives more often than the one's that I turned off every day. since shutting down my systems, the electricity bill dropped as well....

 

my laptop is on all week, until i make the 2 hour drive up to whistler from vancouver every weekend and then it goes off for the trip up, then again for the trip down...

 

I reset my machine every week. So I'd say leave it on, but turn off the monitor.

 

Leave my laptop on 24/7, last time I shut down or rebooted was about a month ago Of course it sleeps when I shut the lid, but I only do that when I move it around.

 

I leave my main desktop on 24/7. It runs Windows (unfortunately...there are a few programs I run that are Windows only ...), so it gets a reboot about once a week to clear the ram/cache/pagefile/whatever. The hardware has no problems, just the software since it's Windows. The only thing I worry about is the hard drive. Turning it on and off all the time wears out the hard drive spooling motor quicker than just letting it run all the time, at least in my experience. On average the hard drives that get run 24/7 last around 5 years for me, the backup hard drives that I turn on about once a week, update, then shut off usually only last about half that time. My main laptop, on the other hand, gets put to sleep when I'm not using it. It goes up and down maybe 20 times a day. I don't let it run because 1) Heat 2) It gets moved alot, taken everywhere. I've had this one, Apple PowerBook G4, for almost 3 years. No problems with it, I'm very impressed, though, I am a true believer that Mac's are far superior products.

-Pest

 

I'm right with you, I have a macbook pro, love it, never had any problems, and yes, the OS and hardware are far superior It's also my windows machine because of parallels. (need windows for work, and sometimes school)

 

I read an article years ago in an electronics magazine and they did a test. They bought 4 identicle radios. Two of them they left on all the time never shutting them off. The other two they turned on and off daily.
Both of the two being cycled on and off failed before the other two that were left on all the time. Their conclusion was that the constant spiking of voltage on power up caused premature failure of power components.
Made sense to me...so i leave mine on.

 

Yay, another Mac junkie!

Something I forgot to mention; I turn my monitor off almost religiously when not in use to save power. Desktop PSU's are so large because of how efficient they are.

-Pest

 

Leave them on and set them to turn off the hard drives to save wear and tear on those. Then set them so sleep. I have a media PC I built that turns off all fans so it appears to be completely off when it is in sleep mode. Very nice for the living room since it is technically on, but dead silent and starts up instantly.