Computer question.

Yvsa

Yvsa

Joined
May 18, 1999
Messages
15,395
Okay all you PC gurus out there what do you do with your PC when you sign off for the night? :)
I've always left mine on so it could get automatic updates from Winders the 2nd Tuesday of the month when applicable along with security updates I have scheduled and I was also told it's best to leave a PC on than turning it off and on every day.
But with the cost of our electric going up nearly $20.00 a month because of the increased fuel costs and we consumers having to pay for the ice storm cleanup back in December I'm thinking of putting mine in hibernation, to sleep, or whatever power saving options I may have at night to maybe save a little money.
Sooooo, my question is....
..... Is it worth the trouble to put a PC to sleep at night, turn it off completely, or should I just leave it running and ready to go like I always have? :confused:
Being the lazy bastid I am I like having it up and running and ready to go when I do manage to make it over to my corner but the cheap bastid part of me is wanting to cut costs wherever possible.:o ;) :)



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Buy a Kill-a-Wall and monitor your PC to see how much power it uses when you're away from it. Then compute your costs.

Let's say that not using an automatic suspend eats up an extra 100 watts for 12-hours/day. That's 1200 watt-hours, or 1.2 Kw/h. Let's say you're paying 10 cents/ KwH (I'm guessing you pay more). In any case, assuming I'm not talking out my butt, that would be 12 cents/day you pay for convenience, or about $44/year.

If your PC eats more than 100w in idle (good chance it does), if you pay more than $0.10/KwH (good chance you do), if you're PC sits in idle more than 12 hours/day if you don't allow it to auto suspend after 1 hour in idle (it probably does), then it's costing you more than $44/year. My guess is it might be as much as $100/year.

Of course, you have to measure how much juice your PC eats in suspend mode. Again, talking out my butt, I'm guessing it's more than 15 watts unless it's new. Funny thing is that over the lifetime of a PC, a laptop could save you the premium you paid over a desktop just in saved electricity (assuming a laptop can do everything you want it to do).

Also, buying a new PC can sometimes pay for itself if you use it a lot because newer PCs are much better with power management and much more reliable (and speedy) when coming out of suspend. If your older PC is too slow coming out of suspend or locks up too often when trying to do so, you probably won't use that feature.

My newest laptop (Dell XPS M1530) has come out of suspend every time for the past 3 months I've owned it. Take about 15 seconds (just a guess). My wife's older laptop (Dell Inspiron 1100?) is unreliable with suspend. It's only about a 5% failure rate, but that's enough that she just leaves the thing on all day. It might be unreliable because it uses some bastardized desktop chip that wasn't designed with full power management in mind or it might just be those pesky gremlins I keep hearing about. Who knows?
 
Well I don't know what the price of your electricity is, but here's how I look at it...

Let's assume you parked your butt in front of the computer for a total of five hours a day. How much would you save on electricity by turning it off?

A computer which is not in use is probably using 100-150 watts or possibly much less. (depending on if it's spinning the hard drives because of downloading things etc.)

Let's say you used it for five hours a day - so if you turned it off you'd be saving on nineteen hours or so.

150 watts * 19 hours = 2850 Wh = 2.85 kWh <-- the optimistic energy savings.

Where I live, 1 kWh is about 8.5 cents. So if you were me, you'd save a maximum of one shiny quarter per day by turning it off or by hibernating.

Personally I think it's worth the convenience of having the computer always ready, even if it's just to check the weather or something while running out the door. But that's me.

I tend to think of hibernating as something used more for laptops than desktops, but depending on your electricity rates and your circumstances and such it might be worthwhile. In terms of power savings I don't think you would be able to tell the difference between hibernating and shutting down unless you were reading the meter yourself.

As for turning it off and on every day being harmful - I don't think I've ever heard such a thing in the last 13 years or so. If anything, the opposite would be true IMO, but computers can last and last and last if they're stored in a decent environment. :)

Edit - As Raja states, the newer your computer is, the cheaper it will be to run it.
 
I turn mine off every time I leave it, to go out or to go to sleep. it only takes a minute or so to get it up and running again.

Yvsa, when I shut it off on Tuesdays, just before it goes off, it asks if I want to shut it off right now and load automatic updates later, or let it load the updates and shut off after the few minutes it takes. I let it load them and shut itself off afterwards.

So you don't have to keep it on to load them. It will do it before shutting off.
 
Advice to "never power down" dates from 25 years ago, and it was good advice at the time. Some hard drives didn't have self-parking heads, because they were scaled-down mainframe drives and mainframe drives were designed never to be powered down. And cheap hard drives had stepper-motors: they needed to warm up for 20-30 minutes before you started recording data. So you could save yourself some grief by never powering down.

Some people claim that powering on and off stresses integrated circuit chips and shortens their life. This could be true, but no one knows for sure. No one knows for sure how long integrated circuit chips can last. If they don't fail in the first 200 hours of use and they aren't abused, they are good for the life of the system.

But hard drives are much shorter-lived, and the longer you run them, the closer they are to failure. So I would say power down and save a little electricity, although it may not be much.
 
I guess I have three reasons I power down when I'm not using the box:
1.) Basic security - anyone who turns it on when I'm not around has to know both my user name and passcode ( Linux box - haven't used the Wndws partition in so long I don't remember how that works)
2.) Less time for someone to attempt a brute force password attack - invulnerable to this when it's physically off.
3.) At this point in time - I'm just not comfortable wasting power that people are dying for.If I don't need it - I ain't gonna use it.
 
I always shutdown overnight unless I'm running a scan (anti-virus or spyware). I think Piso Mojado has it right about hard drives failing on startup being the reason people were told not to shut down in the "old days" of computing. However, HDs are much better now so that's not beneficial anymore. Unless you've got issues like losing BIOS settings, I'd say shutdown between sessions.
 
Hi All,

Unless I fall asleep with the computer on (usually listening to the BBC), I unplug my computer from the broadband when I'm not using it, and I leave it hibernating and unplugged, although not powered down

Reason for this has nothing to do with energy usage and everything to do with botnets and cybercrime. I don't particularly want someone taking over my computer, and one way to make this harder is to leave the computer disconnected when I'm not actively working on it. It's also why I don't use wireless unless I have to.

F
 
i do an incremental backup at midnite then power off as part of the backup, i'm usually in bed by 11:30 ish. pc is set to turn on again when i hit any key on the kbd. i do that when i get up & go past on the way to the head for a wee. pc gets turned off if i am going to be away from it for more than an hour.

early pc's had individual memory chips you'd plug in to sockets, no clips to hold them, so thermal cycling (power on/off) could cause hot chips to 'walk' out of the sockets and cause memory errors till you reseated them. max mem was 640k. :) modern memory is designed to prevent that. with improved hard disks and power management you can even set the power settings so that the monitor turns off after 15 min, hard disks power down after 30 and system goes into standby at 45min. of disuse, which is what i do. i do not use hibernation, it can cause interesting network and memory anomalies with some software/hardware combinations.
 
i dont allow auto updates on my pc since its a home built so i turn mine off when i'm done. i run my own security programs and my system is 6 years old and has ran fine without a single update. i have one or two minor bugs but nothing major. it is a good idea to restart your computer at least once a day if you leave it on 24-7.
 
I don't auto update - I wait to see what patches do to other machines first :)

I also turn mine off every night. Not so much for money saving but just the fact I don't like electrical devices on while I am sleeping.
 
kronckew said:
early pc's had individual memory chips you'd plug in to sockets, no clips to hold them, so thermal cycling (power on/off) could cause hot chips to 'walk' out of the sockets and cause memory errors till you reseated them. max mem was 640k. :) modern memory is designed to prevent that.
Click to expand...

My first PC was an Atari 800 with memory maxed out to 48k. The earliest IBM and IBM-clone PCs maxed out to 512K. I had one of those too: a Corona, which was an Olivetti-built Compaq clone (clone-of-a-clone). I later bought and installed an upgraded ROM-BIOS so it could recognize 640k.

The only old PC I heard of with the DRAMs walking problem was the Apple III (1980-84). Apple advised users to pick the computer up a few inches and slam it down to reset the chips. It was not a good fix.
 
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I use the computer about 2 hours a day, and when I'm done I shut it down and turn the power off at the power bar. If I am going to return to the PC later on say after lunch then I just park it in sleep mode.

Like as others mentioned it does not take long for modern machines to boot up from a complete shutdown. With broad band updates and downloads are quick and do not need to be done overnight like in the old dial-up days.
 
These days I run a hobby web server off my computer, so it stays on almost all the time, except for the occasional restart or shut down either for installation of updates, software, or to fix some program bug that needs the system to be rebooted. However, I've got a similar model hooked up permanently to my TV for use as an entertainment unit, and when not in use, I put it in "sleep" mode. If I was going to be away for an extended period though, I'd shut 'er down.
 
Use hibernation...that way you save power and when you boot up it returns it to it's system state, which doesn't take as long, or eat as much juice.
 
Thanks everyone.:thumbup: :D I was expecting more generalized answers such as, "Hibernate it." "Put it in Sleep Mode." and the like as I hadn't given the answer much thought so I'm still not sure what's best for me.:o
I may go ahead and try putting it in hibernation and see how that works out for a while but may just go ahead and turn it off seeing as how I've been having to restart it at least once every day here lately whether I've wanted to or not.
Updating to the new 3.0 Firefox has evidently caused a few blips on my PC probably because of the way I have it setup.:o ;) :)



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I never turn my computer off unless there is some big thunderstorm knocking on my door. But if I decide to go outside and mow for a couple hours, the last thing I do is click the black apple, go down, Sleep. The G5 running OS X goes to sleep in just a few seconds. When I come back, I click the mouse button, it is back up and ready in 3 seconds. Before I go to bed, same thing.

I've been doing that for years. Wouldn't matter if electricity was free. No point in using energy that you don't need!

Gregg
 
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