Computer - Better to Turn Off or Leave On?

almillar

esuhl - I think he meant the BIOS settings - and that's what I replied to. Losing the BIOS settings is not a failure and can be rectified. Batteries need to be replaced, it's a user servicable part of a (desktop) PC.

The only times I've seen a BIOS "lost" is when a manual flashing process was interrupted by power failure or incompatible firmware was used.

Yes, that's a failure, and that's 'losing the BIOS' not just the settings.

If the battery dies, you lose the CMOS values, but not the BIOS

Fair enough - I was correcting someone who referred to all of the BIOS, whereas I think it was actually a few settings that had been lost.

I just hope that everyone thinking they're causing less 'wear' to their components realises that unless they've changed some specific settings, their hard drives will be switching on and off, spinning up and down, all the time. Fans might be doing the same.

Pikeyp

For what it's worth , my PC has been on now virtually non-stop since I built it over 4 years ago , the last time I turned it off was last August when I was on holiday for 5 weeks, before that April last year for about 3 weeks, before that probably August the previous year etc, etc ..

I've been building my own PC's for donkeys years now and never known of a BIOS failure , and in that time just one PSU as I recall, no other major component failures!

Perhaps I've just been lucky ...