Power save question

Never shutting down your computer because booting it up is harmful or it wears out hardware is pure fiction these days. The simple truth is an electrical or mechanical part/piece/item, in a computer or not, gets worn out through wear and tear, which is use. The parts do not wear out faster because you do the right thing and turn them off when not in use. If you sat there booting up and powering down your system 30 times a day it may be a different story.

Some people do keep their computers on all the time for various reasons. They do something like folding at home so their computer is actually working 24/7.

You may see an office keep their computers on all night but that's for two main reasons. First is that is the time their IT department can run updates and things like that and they need all the computers on in order to do that. Second is it's a loss of productivity for them if their employees have to wait for their computers' to booth up each day. The old antiquated systems most most offices use have longer boot times.

That last issue above, the long boot times, was another reason why your average user used to leave their system on all the time. It was an inconvenience to have wait for it to boot up each time.

Windows has issues with it's Sleep modes. It works fine for some people and not for others. If you are using something like "brand name" system the Sleep mode probably works just fine because they actually test that stuff and make fixes as needed to make it work correctly because all those companies will set up their own power management profiles to keep their systems energy efficient.

Me personally I do not use Sleep or Hibernate. The most I use is I tell the system to put my monitor to sleep after 20 minutes. Beyond that if I know I am going to be away from my computer for an hour or more I shut it down. If I plan on being away for less then an hour I leave it running. All computers these days are fairly efficient so you are not using too much power if the system is idle when you are not using it.

If you take care of your system, keep it clean of junk/temp files, keep a good working registry, don't have a million useless programs loading on start up, your system will work well for many, many years and not run into boot issues.

Systems getting loaded down with junk was another reason that lead to people leaving them on all the time as it increased the boot times. I cleaned up systems for several people I know over the years and it made a huge difference in how their computer ran. The went years with never clearing junk or temp files to the point were I literally cleared Gigabytes worth of junk off their systems.

Makes me shudder to think of Gigabytes worth of space wasted on junk/temp files.


Edit:
A little side note. People used to claim this exact same nonsense about the lights in your house. They said it cost more money to initially power on the light then it did to actually run the light bulb.

Mythbusters kindly tested and busted this as false. The tested it on everything from compact florescent to HID lights (HIDs are the lights like in a school gym known as High Engery Discharge).

For all the light they tests, even the power hungry HIDs, all the lights only used a modest amount of extra energy to power up and the amount of energy the lights used to power up was only equal to the power used by the lights over the course of a few seconds. For lights like compact florescent it equaled only fractions of a second.

Basically the verdict was if you were leaving a room for less then 3 seconds leaving the lights on was better. Anything more then that and it used less power to turn the lights off then back on when you came back into the room.


Edited by jmaster299 - 21 Dec 2011 at 11:26am