Should you shut down your computer at night ?

Rigsby

I have heard that constantly shutting down and restarting your computer is not a good thing, because of the constant warming up then cooling down involved. Up to recently I have being using the "sleep" function, but it seems to be very sensitive and "wakes up" for no reason. As a result, I now start it up in the morning, leave it on all day, then shut it down last thing at night.

Is this OK, or does it make no difference one way or the other ?

Thanks.

fionnsda

I shut my pc down at night, why leave it on using power! i'd say a computer must use about 150watts average.
first I've heard of the warming up and cooling down not being a good thing, sounds to me a load of balls!

Rigsby

fionnsda wrote: »

I shut my pc down at night, why leave it on using power! i'd say a computer must use about 150watts average.
first I've heard of the warming up and cooling down not being a good thing, sounds to me a load of balls!

Thanks for your reply. The "sleep" function only uses a minimal amount of power. The "warming up and cooling down" information was from "Windows" itself.

maggy_thatcher

Technically, the most stressful time in a computers life is startup/shutdown - the HDs have to move, and there is a (miniscule) risk of damage due to thermal expansion, but realistically it's very unlikely to happen.

Obviously flicking it on/off continuously is not going to do your computer any good, and personally I leave mine on overnight as that's when it runs its backup jobs, but you're generally fine turning it off when not in use.

fionnsda

Rigsby wrote: »

Thanks for your reply. The "sleep" function only uses a minimal amount of power. The "warming up and cooling down" information was from "Windows" itself.

Yes if it works correctly my sleep does the same as yours
like you said earlier i don't think it matters that much but if your using win 7 sure it boots up quite fast anyway!

Voodu Child

Thermal stress does shorten the life of some components, but it's likely that your computer will be obsolete and useless long before this happens. Or it'll fail for some completely unrelated reason.

Rigsby

Thanks for your input everyone.


Out of interest, is there a way to adjust the sensitivity of the "sleep" mode ? As I said earlier, sometimes when in this mode, it starts up for no reason.

Tallon

use Hibernate

Rigsby

Tallon wrote: »

use Hibernate

Only have "shut down" or "sleep"

bhickey

You can enable Hibernation in your Power Settings. It reserves a chunk of your disk (equivalent to the size of your RAM) and once enabled you'll see it as an option.

youcancallmeal

Since upgrading to Windows 7 I tend to leave my PC on as much as possible. I find it good for identifying issues because if my PC has rebooted during the night or when I'm out during the day then I will know something is wrong, event viewer is good for finding out the what/why? I would normally reboot my PC every 2 weeks just clear up any memory leaks and the likes but my record is 26 days uptime. I used to struggle to get more than 7 days out of XP before is crashed or became very slow.

I'm not really sure how much this adds to my electricity bill? I'll have a guess though. During the night the CPU will throttle itself down, hard disks turn off, monitors turn off etc. So say thats maybe 100w/h, over 10 hours thats 1Kwh. I think ESB is around 15c per Kwh so then over the space of a month thats €4.50.

I've presumed a lot there so that is a pure guesstimate

EoghanConway

Sleep and hibernate won't solve the thermal expansion issues, which as Voodu Child pointed out are pretty low priority on the list of things that could put your computer in the bin.

If you're really concerned use a low-power chipset and solid state memory. Then your comp won't get hot in the first place.

lil_lisa

Does anyone know which is better for saving energy?? Hibernating or sleeping all night or switching off every evening and back on every morning?

maggy_thatcher

lil_lisa wrote: »

Does anyone know which is better for saving energy?? Hibernating or sleeping all night or switching off every evening and back on every morning?

Hibernating and power off both use the same amount of power- none assuming you've turned the power off at the wall, otherwise a small amount of power for a couple of simple things - soft power on, wake on LAN, etc.
Sleep uses a little more power, but still not much. As an example, my laptop will last for 4 hours in normal use or about 5 days in sleep. Desktops aren't generally as frugal as laptops, but the ratio us probably about the same.

Bob_Harris

lil_lisa wrote: »

Does anyone know which is better for saving energy?? Hibernating or sleeping all night or switching off every evening and back on every morning?

The power supply will draw a tiny bit of wattage from the wall even if the computer is off. It's a miniscule amount but it does it all the same. To use zero energy turn off the computer and switch off at the plug.

Depending on your power supply sleeping (S3) will use about 3 to 5 watts. The advantage of sleep mode is turning back on the computer is pretty much instant.

If the computer is in hibernation mode (S4), it is off. But this means it has to start from "cold" again, grab the state data from the hard drive and eventually you are back up and running.

I suppose you could argue that if the computer is set up correctly and has CPU throttling (reducing speed and voltage of CPU, hence wattage consumed) enabled, that sleeping for X amount of hours, waking up instantly allowing the OS to apply CPU throttling would be more efficient than hibernating for X amount of hours. When the computer is starting up from hibernation it is in the pre-OS environment for a decent amount of time, where the CPU will not be throttled.

If wattage consumed in the waking from hibernation process is greater than wattage consumed while asleep, then sleeping is better. I would image you would have to be starting and stopping pretty regularly for this to happen.

It's a tiny amount of energy either way. e.g. using 5w for 12hours @ €0.18 per kWH is only €0.32 a month, or €3.94 a year. I think it worth it for instant access to boards.ie and porn.

bonzodog2

The best thing about hibernation is you can leave browsers and other window open and they are there when you power up again. The small downside is the disk space equivalent to your RAM size it needs to save the machine's state. I find it it faster than a total shutdown. Its a good idea to do a full restart every now and then though.

spider guardian

There'll always be a few diehards who claim that thermal cracking will kill your PC but there has never been any conclusive evidence that daily powering up/down actually damages your PC, save money and shut it down or hibernate when you aren't using it.

The amount of energy that is wasted by all the idle PCs on this planet is shameful

HxGH

Not only does shutting it off save you on the electricity bill but it saves you buying parts for your comp.

Comp hardware just gets old and slower much faster.

imitation

If your computer uses 150w w(inc monitor and the rest) and you leave it on 24 hours a day (24x0.150X.15x365) then its going to cost you 200 euros a year. Considering thats 1/3 of a new PC and you'll actually probably be using it 1/6 of that time your probably better off turning it off. Also take into account they are dust traps when they are running and I think its safe to say turning it off is the way to go.

lil_lisa

Yes but the question is, if you only use it 8 hours of the day and put it into hibernation for the rest, does that use more power than booting up fresh every day? AFAIK, the computer isn't using power when its in hibernation, at least the bare minimum.

Voodu Child

lil_lisa wrote: »

Yes but the question is, if you only use it 8 hours of the day and put it into hibernation for the rest, does that use more power than booting up fresh every day? AFAIK, the computer isn't using power when its in hibernation, at least the bare minimum.

When your computer is in hibernation, it uses the same amount of power as when it is turned off. ie close to zero, depending on phantom power and whether wake-on-lan is actived etc.

Waking from hibernation uses less power than a fresh boot, but you're talking about a negligible difference. It'll save a few seconds bootup time, but you're not talking about something that would save you money on the electricity bill :pac:

lil_lisa

I'm more concerned about the waste of energy and power than the electricity bill. From what you're all saying, I don't think it makes a big difference.

Bob_Harris

Using my trusty wattage meter I found the below regarding my computer.

When it is "Off" (still plugged into the mains) it was drawing on average 4W.
When in sleep mode (s3 state) it was using on average 6W.

It takes just about 1 minute (60 seconds) to boot into the OS from a cold start (I'm assuming resuming from hibernation will be similar), using on average 210W.
((210 / 1000) * 1) / 60 = 0.0035 kWh

Compared to sleeping @ 6w for 35min = .0035 kwh

If you want to reduce the wattage your computer draws look into lowering the CPU voltage. Depending on your CPU, you can download software which you can customize the throttling levels (Power states). Find the lowest possible voltage for each of the power states. It can knock 20-30W off of the total system Wattage if you get the voltage low enough.

Undervolting won't damage the hardware, it will just cause the computer to crash if set to low. Overvolting will damage hardware if set too high.

Another advantage of undervolting is a cooler running CPU, means quieter fans.