Leaving your computer on...
- Thread starter Betamax-
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Associate
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Leaving your PC on won't do it any harm. If anything, it will help prolong the life of it, because the electronics go through less temperature cycles. If you turn your PC off, the electronics get cool, causing them to contract slightly, when you turn it on, they'll warm up, and expand, but if you leave them on, they'll stay constant.
Don't get yourself worried either way though, as the difference it make is so little, you don't notice a difference, unless you plan on trying to keep using the same PC for 20 years or something...
Don't get yourself worried either way though, as the difference it make is so little, you don't notice a difference, unless you plan on trying to keep using the same PC for 20 years or something...
Bit pointless. Unless you are using your PC for something (eg Downloading, folding etc) while you are sleeping/working/out it's wasteful and uneccessary to leave it switched on all the time.
I doubt if any form of damage is caused to components when powered down and they will be built with this in mind. Even if the life of the PC were reduced by a few percent it's unlikely that in ten years or whatever you'd still be using it to notice a component failure other than a hard drive failing.
Besides you can go weeks without rebooting these days. How will you know when it can go no longer without a reboot? In the olden days of Windows 95/98 things used to go to a crawl but in these modern times of loads of RAM and Windows 7 I bet it would just run and run.
Switching off your PC for 10 hours a day can save you £50 a year.
I doubt if any form of damage is caused to components when powered down and they will be built with this in mind. Even if the life of the PC were reduced by a few percent it's unlikely that in ten years or whatever you'd still be using it to notice a component failure other than a hard drive failing.
Besides you can go weeks without rebooting these days. How will you know when it can go no longer without a reboot? In the olden days of Windows 95/98 things used to go to a crawl but in these modern times of loads of RAM and Windows 7 I bet it would just run and run.
Switching off your PC for 10 hours a day can save you £50 a year.
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Soldato
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Don't mean to be hippy, but leaving your computer on needlessly is bad for the environment! Plus not good for whoever pays the electricity bill.
I don;t leave my PC on unless its doing something. All other times its off. Bear in mind that even at idle my Sandy rig is probably drawing 100w at least, leaving it on while you are at work (8 hrs) and in bed (a conservative 6 hrs) is costing you 1400w a day. At an again conservative 10p per kw thats 14p a day to run a computer thats not being used which doesn't exactly sound like much.
£51 a year though (0.14*365). Thats not exactly nothing.
£51 a year though (0.14*365). Thats not exactly nothing.
+1, has never done any of my PC's any harm turning them off at a night time.
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Do you have an old Laptop or something? That's what I use, it's an old celeron, that belongs to one of my housemates, and he's removed the fan & battery & keeps the screen off all the time, and we just connect to it via remote desktop. Costs us about 2p a day to leave on.
I used to leave mine on at uni for weeks at a time, these days it's a few days max. Leaving it on doesn't do it any harm although I've found my computer likes a restart every few days else it starts to slow down :-/
MW
MW
An old celeron/board/ram running at about 8w? wat? have you actually measured the wattage with anything? even a basic energy monitor would do.
I run folding@home on rigs which are on 24/7 at full load for months at a time without a reboot, never had any problems, other than the leccy bill
A simple 200w draw at 10p per kw is 0.02p per hour, 0.48p per day and £175 a year. And you run how many of these?
Must be a crazy man!
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A simple 200w draw at 10p per kw is 0.02p per hour, 0.48p per day and £175 a year. And you run how many of these?
Must be a crazy man!
Indeed! There are many more crazy people in here . We do it as a hobby and the research done by the computers is for worthwhile causes like cancer, huntingdons etc. You could look at it as donating money to charity, but instead donating electricity to run research.
I only have 1 rig running 24/7 now and it doubles as my server as well, some folders have a lot more than that.
Soldato
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An old celeron/board/ram running at about 8w? wat? have you actually measured the wattage with anything? even a basic energy monitor would do.
A simple 200w draw at 10p per kw is 0.02p per hour, 0.48p per day and £175 a year. And you run how many of these?
Must be a crazy man!
Get yourself a power meter boys and you'll be shocked
Folding is especially bad... stress cpu + gpu and you're looking at 330W easily. I used to do boinc with dual/tri cards ... 500W per machine easily
100W idle for a pc sounds very conservative .... try 160W instead for a modern PC.
Oh don't forget the monitors ! The new monitors these days are great consuming only 30ish W but the old LCDs can use 70->100+W each....
And lets not even talk about an apple cinema screen --- kill - a - lotta - watts
Get yourself a power meter boys and you'll be shocked
Folding is especially bad... stress cpu + gpu and you're looking at 330W easily. I used to do boinc with dual/tri cards ... 500W per machine easily
100W idle for a pc sounds very conservative .... try 160W instead for a modern PC.
Oh don't forget the monitors ! The new monitors these days are great consuming only 30ish W but the old LCDs can use 70->100+W each....
And lets not even talk about an apple cinema screen --- kill - a - lotta - watts
A tri SLI system can easily consume 7-800w under load
Luckily I run a Shuttle so power consumption is pretty low, about 260w under load iirc
MW