.FLYINGHEAD TECH TIPS
.TITLE Should you turn your computer off at night?
.AUTHOR Stephen Amontis
.SUMMARY Stephen Amontis answers one of the old, classic computer questions: should you turn your computer off at night?
.OTHER
One of my friends asked me one of those classic computer questions, and this time I decided to answer it with some care:
.QUOTE I have often heard it is best not to power down your system at night, any of you IT guys have an opinon on this? I always shut my rig down at night, but it is a new computer and I don’t want to damage it by turning it on and off all the time, so what say you?
I’ve been a computer technician for 20 years, and a network engineer for 12 years. I also worked as an auto mechanic for 10 years prior to getting in to the computer field. Computers and cars have alot in common, for example most mechanical failures in both cars and computers occur during start up. Generally, when someone tells you they’ve had a failure, you’ll often hear, "It was fine last night, but when I started it up today…"
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.H1 Cost
That being said, I never leave my computer on when I’m not using it. The main reason is it is a huge waste of energy. That 450 watt power supply is no different than a light bulb, so imagine running a 450 watt bulb 24 hours a day.
Computing Unplugged estimates that a typical PC with a large power supply, a good video card, and a few hard drives adds $10-15/month to your power bill when running 24/7.
Also, manufacturing processes have changed and most equipment today is designed to be turned on and off.
.H1 Wear and tear
The next thing to consider is the wear and tear on things like drives when running your computer 24 hours a day. Your car is most likely to be damaged when you start the engine, but you wouldn’t leave it running 24 hours a day.
That’s because the gas costs would be astronomical and leaving it running puts a lot of wear and tear on moving parts like bearings and lubricant. These are generally same type of bearings and lubricant you might find inside your hard drive or the fans in your computer.
.H1 Rebooting is good
Another thing to consider is the operating system. Unlike expensive server operating systems, consumer operating systems (like Windows XP) are not meant to run for days or weeks or even months without being restarted.
Many of the write and save operations of modern-day operating systems occur during shutdown. It’s important to run your computer through the shut-down process to make sure many of your settings get written to the OS and registry.
.H1 Rebooting is good for system updates
How about system updates? As anyone knows that runs a computer nowadays, updates are a way of life. Most people have Automatic Updates turned on for their computer. But did you know that most of those updates don’t take effect until you restart your system, even if they don’t prompt you to restart?
So if you go for months at a time without a restart, you may as well not even do the updates. The other possible issue is if you have not restarted your system for a month and suddenly you are experiencing a blue-screen or problem on boot-up, you now have to retrace what you have done over the last month to find the culprit. If you shut down every night it is much simpler to find the problem.
.H1 The strange problems of the always-on crowd
The last point I’ll make is just one of personal experience. My current ocupation puts me in a position of being responsible for approxamately 500 users. One of the things I have personally noticed is that the people that seem to have the majority of strange problems are the people that never turn their computer off.
They show up at our door with their laptop telling us it won’t do something it did just fine the day before. The majority of the time I find that a simple restart fixes the problem.
.H1 Dave’s alternative approach
While I turn my computers off at night, my buddy Dave (Computing Unplugged’s Editor-in-Chief) doesn’t. Of course, he’s a little weird, so I wouldn’t recommend you do what Dave does in every circumstance.
Anyway, he works strange hours and sometimes through the night, and he likes his computers to be available whenever he wants them to be. So he keeps his machines on all the time. For some of those machines it makes sense. He has two machines dedicated to monitoring the health of the ZATZ servers, and he needs those machines on at all times just to see what’s happening at his hosting provider.
The other 12 computers are a separate story. Some of the laptops he keeps off unless he’s using them for something specific. But his desktop machine, development machine, test machines, and other media machines are on all the time.
There’s a downside, though: something’s always failing. About once a month, he’s got a fan failure, a power supply failure, a drive failure or something else. It’s not really that his stuff fails more often, but when you’ve got 12 or more computers, you’re going to experience in a month what most people will experience in a year. Even so, his stuff does break more than I’d want.
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