Poll: How many of you leave your computer on overnight?

Maybe this is more of a Desktop question, but how many of you leave your computer on overnight, i.e. 24/7? Given the added expense of electricity and wear and tear, just wondering if so, why? I have had two desktops last 10+ years
without replacing a single fan, HDD, PSU, etc., and always turn them off at night. Could save a decent amount of energy if most people don't but could change. Just a thought...

 

I leave my DTR laptop on 24/7. The idle power is only 5 or 6 watts and there are no moving parts when it's idle. Power consumption and wear and tear were relevant when I still had a desktop, but I scrapped my last one 2 or 3 years ago.

 

If anything, I would think frequently turning the PC on and off causes more wear-and-tear than leaving it on 24/7.

I only use sleep on all of my computers, both laptop and desktop. I pretty much never turn them off or restart them unless there's a crash or some update, e.g. Windows Update, requires a restart. Sleep uses a negligible amount of power anyways and just the time I save not waiting for the PC to shut down/boot up is worth it. I've gone months without turning the computer off except to install Windows Updates.

 

Guess I figured if most all computer users did this, the accumulative energy saved would be decent. But maybe not.

 

With SSD, I leave my laptop on 24/7. Heat isn't an issue when idle.

 

Always on, but I put it to sleep when I'm not using it for more than an hour, or if it is not downloading something. I think I reboot every month or so.

 

Turn it on in the morning. Turn it off when I go to bed
Put it to sleep if I`m away for a while during the day

 

I always Turn mine OFF overnight, unless i am in the bed already and laziness will not allow me to move 2 meters then sometimes it is sw-on overnight.

Longer the fan spins, the more dust it picks up,

DUST - Enemy Number 1
I HATE IT.

 

My desktop is always on, gets a reboot when it's time for updates and the occasional shutdown every few months for dusting, the dust filters on it help a lot.

 

I occasionally leave my computers running overnight to finish off some huge downloads though my 100meg connection tends to reduce the need now. On other days it just means that I forgot to turn off my computer off properly! (Usually my notebook than my desktop which is more quiet on operation.)

 

I haven't turned off for couple months now. I'll probably turn off to clean some dust out later on.

 

I leave my file server desktop on all the time but I turn off all my other PCs when they're not being used.

Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk 2

 

I have a 10 year old IBM ThinkPad R40, which stayed ON for more than a year without rebooting/powering off. It never had any hardware issues and still runs on the origional internals. My rule of thumb is to always leave the machine ON, I'd only reboot/shutdown if there's a real necessity (upgrade/updates/OS install/etc)

 

I do maybe 50/50 on turning off my main laptop when I'm done, or just closing the lid and picking back up the next morning. Energy usage in laptops is so low on idle and light usage that I simply don't care.

For my desktop, I leave it off when I'm at home most of the time since I don't need to be running two computers at once since I can't game or run F@H at home due to a crappy internet connection. However, back at school I run my desktop running 24/7, with or without F@H running in the background. Electricity is "free" there (included in room and board when I was living on-campus, and now a flat monthly rate now that I'm off-campus), so I also don't care about the amount of power I'm using, but then again idle usage is very low for modern hardware.

 

Well leaving a laptop on continuously kinda defeats the purpose, don't you think? And while it does only use a trickle of electricity, its still a waste if its not in use. In addition, its portable nature makes it a poor candidate for 24/7 operation.

On the other hand, leaving it on and continuously processing data aren't exactly the same thing. Something many desktops must be able to do natively

 

I leave my laptop on if it's downloading something, and even then I use auto shutdown once downloads are finished. Otherwise I turn it off completely, including the power brick.
I'm a student, and electricity is quite expensive in my area, so I try to save power as much as I can.

 

Turn off mine when i'm done. Always.

 

I use my PC 3 to 4 hr in a day. My PC is 2 years old. I don't waste any energy for operating my PC. When I leave my PC for 2min then I switch off my monitor. I happy with my PC.

 

A half dozen or so XP, Vista, W7, and server systems at home are all left on 24/7 with full power management including hibernation and Wake-on-LAN. Homebuilt systems have 80+ high efficiency power supplies. Power management settings are enabled according to Energy Star 5 or 6 guidelines.

The responsiveness of less than 30 second resume from hibernate with all previous work intact and very, very low additional power consumption is worth it. I suspect I'd wait longer, and use more electricity waiting for systems to boot mulitple times per day.

 

I don't think any of my computers are powered off these days - they're left to sleep. Workstations, etc are pretty much left running 24/7.

Whether they hold out is a combination of a lot of things, isn't it - e.g. if your home isn't cleaned often then stuff builds up and can contribute to failure even if you're running clean power, run low loads, turn it off every day, etc.

e.g. The oldest of my servers are the Dell Poweredge 2650 generation - that chassis is a decade-plus old, and they've been on and pretty intensively used 24/7/365 in the intervening years. They run in a Tier 4 datacentre environment and I can open up any of the machines right now and find them like new inside - which is a big part of why they've been trucking on faultlessly (bar the occasional HDD failure - I still have plenty of spares) in ~9 years.

I can also tell you how long a laptop like the Sony SZ is capable of lasting when on 24/7/365 running Windows Server 2008 R2 in the same controlled, dust-free environment. I needed some mini-servers I could move between datacentres if needed, and I decided to reuse the SZ's I had back then as servers. I found that we were pegging the loads quite high but I thought since the machines were essentially disposable that was OK. These machines weren't being given any additional cooling either - they're just sitting on shelves in a rack in the datacentre. I've since cut back on the number of them running, but not due to failures - none of them died on the job. 4 years after being retired as active notebooks for me, the ones I still have running are still going fine with zero maintenance.

Heck, I can even put my pile-of-dung Mac 'Pro' hardware in a datacentre environment and most of the Apple form-over-function crap-engineering induced issues go away. So longevity is just as much a matter of where you run it as well as how you run it.

 

Computer stays on all day but always gets turned off before going to bed. Can't stand any noises while I'm trying to fall asleep.

 

My Desktop stays on 24/7. I usually keep the laptop in hibernation when I am not using it. I only turn it off when I need to clean or upgrade it.

 

I have 24/7 desktop, I build it myself and I choose everything fanless, except chassis,
the temperature will stay around 40 degree Celsius with noise level 20db@1m with total of 3 fan,
I turned all the motherboard led off for sleeping comfort, after 1 year the fan start to get noisier now 30db@1m.
If I go total fanless my cpu temperature will raise to 60-70 degree Celsius.
I don't know how long this pc will last(the power consumption is around 154watts to 176watts(when the monitor is on).

for notebook last time when I went overseas, I don't have my desktop with me.
I kept them on for 24/7 after 2-3 years all of them stop working.(my acer and Toshiba)
for this vpcz1, it was on 24/7 for 2 years, after that I got my desktop and now my laptop is still working(it is 3 years old+)

 

I mostly leave my desktop on overnight, in fact my system is on almost all day and night, it is lucky if it gets 5 or 10 minutes rest

 

My dell functions 24/7 running small servers and my alien rarely only when it's running the DAYZ server and I feel generous to leave it on for the players like right now... That or finishing a hell of a lot of downloads....I have 7 megabytes a second Internet so by a lot of downloads I mean at least 75 GBs worth which it can finish in 2 to 3 hours

I used to hibernate the alien all the time but the SSDs in it now make it boot in the same time so I just shut it down now

The dell is not audible and even at 100% CPU the QUAD runs at 130 F as for the Nvidia....Uhm it was a brand new install today.....it runs at 99F idle the thing only has 1 fan yet it runs so cold

 

I always thought you can leave desktops on but should shut laptops off, but what do I know? Anyway I only have laptops and I'm always shutting them off and turning them back on. Is it not safer to carry them when turned off, and isn't it easier on the hard drive to have it shut off while carrying it, and easier on the fan and dust acculturation too? So then what are the experts recommending for laptops these days?

 

There's nothing really special about laptops parts really. I'd imagine that the only real concerns with laptops would be heat and the mechanical hard drive's head slamming into the disk(s) if you drop the laptop.

I've never had any issue carrying around laptops while they were running (closed or opened), even with mechanical HDDs. Though I'm just talking about regular walking (when it's open) and a backpack and walking around (when inside the backpack, closed).

If you're worried about your data, keep a backup elsewhere. Bonus points if you replace the laptop's HDD for a SSD. But *always* keep backups, regardless of what you're using (laptop, desktop, whatever) and how you use them.

 

I'll have to do some experimentation with that, J, as I've always had laptops and always shut them off and turned them on, especially when I'm moving them. I've got an old fashioned hard drive, but next laptop, which I should be getting quite soon, will be ss, and sure I keep my backups separate from the laptop, on external hard drives or flash. Do the manufacturers have any recommendations on this subject? I've not seen any.

 

On what? Carrying them around when they're operating? I haven't seen anything on that at all, really. I just go by the build quality of the laptop and whatever testing it's gone through (such as business-class laptops and MILSPEC) and if it can survive something like MILSPEC, it can survive being in my bookbag while walking around on campus .

 

"On what? Carrying them around when they're operating? "

Carrying them around on Sleep mode, or leaving them on 24/7.

" if it can survive something like MILSPEC, it can survive being in my bookbag while walking around on campus "

If you're talking about a Panasonic Toughbook or something that is a whole different kettle of fish. I'm talking about ordinary laptops.

 

Well, I was thinking about something like the Latitude/Thinkpad/Elitebook, though a Toughbook would certainly survive as well. Anyway, the only laptops I've owned were a Toshiba Satellite and the two Thinkpads in my sig. Treated them all the same way; carrying them around in sleep/hibernate, sometimes running for more than 24hr at a time, and other things. The Toshiba died a silent death after two years of use, while my W520 is 2+ years old and still doing well and the X61t was bought used last spring and is also doing very well.

 

"The Toshiba died a silent death after two years of use"

Not such a great testimonial for your method. Show me someone who has left his laptop on more or less 24/7 for the past five or six years and then I'll be more inclined to be convinced.

 

Perhaps someone that has it docked a desktop will be left on 24/7 it's just a laptop on a external display it's a docked laptop....it becomes Basicly a desktop

 

I have done it with several Dell Laptops and Thinkpads. Probably only got turned off almost never - reboots or shutdown for occasional travel. With and without docking stations.

 

Hello everyone..
me always on... :thumbsup:

 

I put my laptops to sleep when not using them. Mainly to protect the screen if it's sitting on a desk. Or in my bag (duh).