Should I Shut Down My PC At Night?
Wed Jan 31, 2007 4:18PM EST
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Reader Jason writes: Is it better to leave a computer on all the time or shut it off when you done? If I leave it on, what settings (like hibernate) should I use?
Years ago the conventional wisdom was that leaving your computer on all the time would allow it to last longer before a crash. The culprit: Your hard drive. Frequent starts and stops would cause your hard drive mechanism to wear out much faster than if the drive never spun down. An old saying (possibly apocryphal)Â was that stopping and restarting a hard drive was the same as eight hours of regular running time.
I talked to the good folks at Seagate to find out if things had changed. According to the company, starting and stopping is not a huge problem with drives any more, and they can be safely shut off and on in order to save power. According to Seagate, you can expect a drive to last for three to five years of running time before dying, though obviously many drives last longer.
What's the big factor that causes drives to die early? Heat, says Seagate. Ensuring your computer stays cool through the proper use of fans is far and away the best thing you can do to keep your drive healthy. I'd imagine that shutting it down when not in use will only help. Naturally, shutting down your computer will also conserve electricity, so unless there's a compelling reason to leave it on (as with a server), you should probably shut down at night.
So, how should you shut down properly? It's completely up to you, really. If you do a full "Shut Down" (or "Turn Off Computer") your computer will be completely off, using no power at all. "Hibernate" and "Standby" are lower-power states that allow you to resume quickly into the Windows desktop. Standby simply powers down hardware components like the hard drive, monitor, and peripherals, but continues to provide power to RAM, so everything you were doing stays active. Hibernate is closer to a shut down: It saves an exact image of your Windows desktop, then powers the PC down. When you awaken from hibernation, everything is back where you last had it. Personally I'm not a big fan of hibernate, because if I'm going to shut Windows down completely I like to reload everything fresh into RAM, which helps system stability. I tend to use both standby (for shorter times away from my PC) and shut down (for more than a few hours of downtime) instead.
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687 Posted by gungadin_stocks on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:14PM EDT Report Abuse
Simple ways to keep your machine running for years. 1. Use a UPS not just a surge protector. 2. Turn your machine off the benefits outweigh the possible problems. Leaving it on attracts dust, spam, highjackers, overuse of power. As well as fans running 24/7 on the cpu, case fans, power supply fans and hard disc motors, bearings wear out of the cheap brushes they put in fans. Machines that are on tend to be affected by power surges more then machines that are off reguardless of surge protectors. People that leave their machines on in work tend to come in on monday mornings with power supply issues. Especially in the lightning capital of the world Florida. 3. Buy an external hard disk and backup your machines files to it. 4. Don't even worry about heating the copper on the mobo it's a non issue at those temps. If a cpu fans stops working the mobo has a sensor that will shut down the machine prior to damage. 5. Turn off printers, external drives and scanners when not in use. Turn off monitors when not in use for more then 30 minutes. Switch to LCD when possible. 6. Remove transformers from the power outlet for items that are not being used. Such as battery chargers for cell phones, notebooks and batteries. 7. Replace as many lights with compact floresant lighting. They pay for themselves in about 3 months. 8. Create 2 email accounts with yahoo. One account for friends. One account for online purchases and other dangerous things. Yahoo checks mail for viruses and spam. If your account gets too much spam you can always get a new one for the online items. Never give the friend account to anyone in a form or forum. 9. Scan your machine occasionly for spam using ad-aware, spybot search and destroy, spyguard and microsofts windows defender. All free! 10. Don't have windows update your OS on its own. Do it manually yourself. 11. I have never personally gotten a virus on my personal machines. I just make sure I do not open any mail or go to web sites that are not legitimate. Occassionally I run AVG antivirus. I hate norton and mcafee as they add all kinds of crud to your machine. Most viruses come from email. But using yahoo mail I feel like I have a lot of protection. 12. Keep your kids off your machine. At least anything web related. Have them have their own machine for email and web surfing. Don't tell me you don't have the money for a pc for them. PC's are cheap. I can't even give 19 in crts aways anymore. I have more people bring their machines in to get fixed that let their kids on them. Napster, free sharing programs etc ruin the OS. 13. Remove all toolbar helpers that link to Internet Explorer, and don't install those free things like weather monitors smiley faces,screen savers etc. Unless someone has verified they are spam free.
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688 Posted by lscrisp on Thu Sep 3, 2009 6:58PM EDT Report Abuse
I'm a computer tech and have been for over 20 years and a big time player of games like Elder Scrolls:Oblivion and most recently I got hooked on World of Warcraft :-) I rarely ever shut off my system unless there is a problem or I'm doing maintenance. I rarely ever have problems with my system, and if I do, it's normally something minor. The most important thing that I've found is that you have to keep the vents cleaned out and the power to the system stable. When I do shut it down, which usually comes out to once every two weeks or so, it's the open the case, take it outside, and blow the dust off the components and more importantly, to clean the fans out. I use an air compressor in my garage to do it, and you wouldn't believe how much junk gets in the system in just a couple of weeks. The VGA fans are very important too, so make sure to clean them too. Dust is usually attracted by static electricity, which can, and does, kill systems every day, so the less dust and dirt in the system, the less heat and static that are also. Yes, leaving your systems on does use more electricity, but the power consumption of a clean, efficient, running computer, is negligible. The monitor (if it's a CRT type) is a different story, they can use quite a bit of power, so just turn that off to save electricity. LCD (flat screen) systems use some, but are way more efficient than the older CRTs. Another thing that I've read from quite a few of these posts is about how long people's systems take to boot up. This has nothing to do with whether you're in hibernate or stand-by mode, it has to do with how much junk is running on your system in the background at boot up. The best thing to do is to learn how to use the msconfig utility and use the startup and services tabs to turn off all that you can in the boot up procedure. When I start my system, I have everything turned off in the startup tab, which frees up untold amounts of system resources. Defragging the drive at least once a week and running something like Ad aware and Spybot (just the two that I use, there are many others that people swear by) at least once a week also, helps keep you a stalemate in the war against the people who "attach" to your system, you can never beat them, but at least it can make it harder for them.
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689 Posted by jtfochtxp on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:43PM EDT Report Abuse
I agree. Shut it down at night, and enable automatic hibernation and standby during the day. You would be surprised at how much dust your fans will take into the computer which also controbuted to the hard drive falture problem. The less your computer has to run, the better.
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690 Posted by davidwsnow98077 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:38PM EDT Report Abuse
Reliability of electronic components cuts in half with each 10degC rise in temp - so temperature IS important. The reliability rating of disks today is in the 50K+ hour range. At 8K hours in a year, your computer is going to obsolete before it breaks - on average. Too bad not all computers are average ;=} Infant mortality of components is the biggest real failure problem.
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691 Posted by t_e_c_h_o_z@sbcglobal.net on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:26PM EDT Report Abuse
Yes, shut your PC Down. It will not harm your Hard Drive, your OS or your electroncis. As a matter of fact it will actually cool down your electronics and processor. Good for your electronics and processor. You should also run basic Utilities on Your computer for your OS, including Degrag, Check Disk, Registry Optimizers, you should regularly clean out your browser cache, temp files. You should occasionaly check the settings in your BIOS. It will not harm your computer to shut it off every night. OZ
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692 Posted by zyi_oct_1976 on Fri Sep 25, 2009 1:02PM EDT Report Abuse
lol this is amusing, the old antage of my fathers time about not shutting down your compy at night is gone, my old compy which I just replaced with a quad cause a single wasn't good enough anymore lasted for over 4 years and I shut it down every night. the one I had before that 6 years shutting down every night and it didn't die I passed that one on to my cousin. I've only had parts fail during install mishaps if you have amd you can get a green button and it will hibernate the compy for you I have one but don't use it cause the light is green and very bright. Times have changes and componets are getting better
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693 Posted by slrman420 on Tue Sep 29, 2009 8:17AM EDT Report Abuse
What you say had some validity at one point, but, as you also say, things change. For example, Apple recommends you do NOT turn off your computer but instead use the "Sleep" function. Admittedly, this is more efficient and uses less power than the Windows "Hibernate". Oddly enough, it also works much faster, too. I have an iMac and my wife has a PC (yes, we're a mixed marriage) so I get to compare these things on a daily basis. Still, I'm sure that Microsoft will continually improve their Hibernate until it is as good as Apple's OSX is today. By then, Apple will have moved on to something far better, but that's the way it's been for over 20 years now.
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694 Posted by luispelaezjr on Thu Oct 15, 2009 12:23AM EDT Report Abuse
Personaly I think that shut down is your best option, to insure power savings and longevity. But just make shure you have your system backed up, and a few bucks saved up in case hardware fails. Again, eventually your computer will die, just like everything else. Just make shure you are ready for such event. And you will off, good. Shut it down.
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686 Posted by wade_d_brown on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:38PM EDT Report Abuse
While people's personal experiences and testimonials are anecdotal evidence and therefore not scientific or reliable, the closest to a controlled trial I can offer is this: I bought two identical desktop PCs at the same time, one for myself, one for another person, and I left mine on 24/7 while the other person turned hers off when not in use. After three years mine quit -- the CRT monitor burned out (even though I had it set to power down into standby mode after twenty minutes of non-use), while inside the computer tower constant heat had rendered plastic parts brittle, and dried out the volatiles (glues and such, so that things were literally coming apart at the seams), the fans were getting cranky, dust had built up despite efforts to keep it clean, the power supply was old and needed replacing as did most other components, so that it made no sense to try to upgrade. I had to recover my data from external backups and trash the machine. The other computer, in contrast, was like new -- little dust, internal components in great shape (no apparent heat damage or brittleness), monitor fine, and in fact is still working today (ten years later!). Now, I turn off my monitors and 90 percent of the time hibernate my computer (hibernation, while a complete power-down, is faster on re-boot, and I like to have files or applications I'm working on up and ready to go when I come back to them; Word files, for example will be at the same page I left them, and since I frequently work with multiple files, many of them over 300 pages long, that saves me the questionable brainpower of remembering where I was).