Leave it on or shut it off?

[Masherbrum]

I shut it off for 2 reasons: 1. it saves electricity and avoids damage due to a late night storm. 2. Hackers can't get to it when it's off.

I'm lost on #2.     

[Getback]

I'm lost on #2.     

My way of thinking is that they have less opportunity to hack if it is off. Now I may be wrong about that. What I do know is that no computer is %100 secure. There's almost always a way to get to it if given enough time.

[Vulcan]

I'm for shutting unused systems down both to save both electricity and to relieve heat-related stress

heat related stress is why I'd leave it on 24/7. Think about it

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Consumer hardware is not rated for 24/7 operation so it should not be used like that.

[Krusty]

We recently found a 12 year old Sun box chugging away quite happily at the back our server room. As best we could tell, no-one had actually used it in about 6 years but it hadn't skipped a beat in all that time.

Yes, and my old solar-powered calculator still works after 15 years of being tossed into tool drawers, change drawers, boxes, etc.


Doesn't really equate, an old 15MHz CPU with no major parts vs a modern-era (past 5 years) computer system.

[llama]

I have several machines that have been on 24/7 for the past 6 years in my home-lab. I have others that I turn on and off whenever I need to use them. My main "daily use" computer was on for 3 years straight until recently.

All I can say is that different parts will fail in different ways based on whether it is always on or not. I think that overall, the maintenance issues are a wash.

Fans are much more likely to fail when the computer is constantly on, and if you don't stay on top of it, then the component they are trying to cool is at risk (think CPUs, GPUs, and some power supplies.) Dust ingestion is an issue with these computers too. Hard drives bearings are more likely to go.

When the computer is regularly turned on and off, then power supplies are more likely to start blowing caps (not terribly likely - just more likely), RAM and PCI cards are more likely to get lose with regular thermal expansion, and hard drive motors are more at-risk. A weak BIOS battery is more likely to reset the CMOS. The CPU can suffer from thermal stresses.

None of these are major, and the failures of one tend to balance out the failures of the other.

Electrical usage is now starting to be an issue, especially since I'm using notebooks more and more for everything but gaming and hardcore numbercrunching. My P3-based servers take about 70 watts when running. My main PC needs 150 watts at idle, and close to 250 when gaming. In SoCal where electricity is expensive, running an unnecessary 150 watts all day can really add up. According my my electric bill and my calculator, when idling, my 150 watt "main PC" costs 92 cents a day to run, or $27 a month, or $324 a year. If I go three days without using it because I'm using my notebooks, it's very wasteful. If I have 3 computers in the house that are always running, you can see how it really adds up.

So, keeping computer component longevity and electrical usage in the balance, I tell my clients to turn on their PCs during the day when they are going to use it, and if if they're likely to return to the computer to use it before the day is over, leave it on, and then shut it down in the evening/night. I'll generally set all the overnight maintenance  stuff for just one night (like Monday), and advise people to leave the computer running overnight just one night a week.

My thoughts,
Llama

[OOZ662]

Here's a different thought: Look up a program called BOINC and the World Community Grid. It's a system that uses everyone's idle computers that are running the program to complete calculations related to helping out research in some way. By doing so, they've amassed the equivalent of easily over a million hours (IIRC) of computing time on a supercomputer.

I leave my computer on at all times (especially since the power supply is getting too weak to get the system to start up cold) and whenever I leave it, I start up BOINC and let it work on various projects. You can also set it to run at all times and only work when the CPU is idle, but I've never trusted that and this is my gamer.
I've been running it for over a year now and haven't gotten any viruses or spyware of any kind (Firefox/AdBlock Plus/NoScript help with that), so I can attest to the security of it as well.