Do I have to turn off computer over night ?

4X4Dodger wrote:

Fourth: Your computer is made up of many devices, some mechanical and many electrical. Why run any of these if it's not necessary? And contrary to one posters the computer is always drawing some level of current if only to keep the LED on the front on.

If anything the hard drives and, if present, optical drives are about the closest thing to "electrical" in a computer. But even those are electronic devices that have electric motors and moving parts. An electrical device is something simple such as a toaster or electric drill.

As for the, hard drive, it goes to sleep on any PC built in the last decade or more. Optical drives do not move unless a disc is present and in use.

Moreover, hard drives and optical drives are on their way out. SSDs have zero moving parts.

As for the computer drawing current when off, that is meaningless since on a laptop it is simply the battery charging circuitry doing its job. The computer itself is shut down or hibernating (which is also off). As far as the computer is concerned it might as well be unplugged.



Mike

4X4Dodger wrote:

In short I advocate being in charge of your computer not the other way around.

But I am! My computer isn't in charge of me, in fact, unless I am pounding on the keyboard forcing it to do my bidding, I completely ignore it. I even ignore turning it off! :)

Different strokes for different folks is all it is. As I mentioned in an earlier post, logging back onto all of the services I need mine for would drive me back to pencil and paper. Easier to just leave it running until a Windows update message drives me to install some updates I apparently can't live without. BTW, regarding Windows Updates and choosing what to install... our corporate policy changed within the past year and now all corporate machines are forced to do automatic updates. Goes against my grain, but I guess the IT people had problems with people skipping them.

Dave

I am surprised by the number of people advocating leaving the computer on 24/7.

First on allowing updates: I never allow any program to automatically update. Many updates include adware and other non related programs that you may not want and dont need...it's Bloatware. I always set my computer to notify me of any update and then I read them and choose which parts of them to allow. Many do this some do not) This alone does wonders to keep your computer "Clean" and running fast.

Second: Simply shutting down the computer will not clean out the cache completely..there is more than one. You need a good program like CCleaner to go in and do that and I run mine once a week.

Third: Leaving your computer on all night has several risks some likely some less likely. The most likely is if you are hooked up to wifi its like leaving your front door open. Virtually anyone can get in. Also if you live in an area of frequent lightning storms you should unplug the computer from the wall. A Surge protector will help, but I have had two laptops and two surge protectors killed by lightning not to mention my wifi.

Fourth: Your computer is made up of many devices, some mechanical and many electrical. Why run any of these if it's not necessary? And contrary to one posters the computer is always drawing some level of current if only to keep the LED on the front on.

If your computer is slow to start you have other problems most likely related to too many programs and apps automatically running on startup. Go into the "startup" and manually disable any programs that are starting up that you dont need. Most are obvious. If you are not sure if one is needed just google it's name and you will find info on it. This helps tremendously in getting your computer to run right. Most new computers are loaded so that nearly all the programs are set to run in the background at startup. This is madness.

In short I advocate being in charge of your computer not the other way around.

I use a desktop and have never owned or used a laptop. Having said that my morning starts with turning on the coffee pot, start the computer and brush my teeth. By then I'm good to go.

The computer stays on all day. When I'm finished using it for the day it performs some security scans, does any needed maintenance, images the drive to a second internal drive, synchronizes some other files from the second internal drive to a external drive along with a copy of the drive image then shuts itself off.

Given that the my boot time is under a minute and a half I really don't see the need to leave it on all the time. Besides the coffee takes longer then the boot and I'm not going to do anything till the coffee s ready.

Since I run most of my tasks on my laptop in virtual machines, I leave my laptop on 24/7 unless on the road, then I suspend all the VMs and either hibernate it or just shut it down.

The advantage of having it shut down is that if it gets stolen, the bad guy will be prompted with a FileVault password before they can continue, so the data is well protected. Then, they need to figure out the password for each encrypted virtual machine.

Although I agree with you in saying that rebooting clears it all up, I dont feel the need to do this every day since most computers come with a lot of memory. I have not seen an out of memory error since win95 and 256k of ram but I also dont know what program you are using either, and certainly you know if your machine runs slow or not and not me. I think for the average user a weekly reboot is fine.

Jacksons wrote:
you don't need to re-boot to clear the cache.

You can clear the browser cache pretty easily, but that doesn't clear everything. Every program that runs on your computer reserves some memory space to run. A well written program will release the memory that it has reserved if you exit the program properly. If you don't shut it off properly or the program isn't well written, the operating system continues to reserve that memory space and other programs can't use it. The only way that I'm aware of to release the memory space is by logging out and back on or rebooting.

Just as an example, I have some photo editing software that I use and it isn't well written. I have to reboot my computer after I use it or other programs give me an "out of memory" error or just won't load. Sometimes the computer gets very slow or locks up after I use the software.

True. But most people won't go through the steps to manually clear it unless they start experiencing problems. Problems which could have been avoided by rebooting it when it's not in use.

you don't need to re-boot to clear the cache.

Rebooting empties the cache, which clears up problems. I worked in a call center a couple years ago and when a customer was having issues with the internet the first thing we had them do was reboot. Rebooting also allows security updates to be installed and helps keep your system safe from hackers and spyware.

If you don't reboot because of the time it takes for your system to come up it may be because you don't do it often enough and your system has to take time to clear itself and install updates.

One suggestion would be to restart your computer after each session on the computer. It will do most of the work while you're away from your system.