Should i shut down my PC every night?

longwalks1

i usually leave my home PC on all night as i have 5 or 6 tabs open on internet explorer, no idea why i do, just habit i guess.


When i log back on in the morning it seems to take forever for everytihng to 'catch up' with itself, is this normal?


Should i just shut it right down every evening instead?

AndyPix

yes, it is best practice to shut down when not in use
A clean start will close any software that is leaking memory and will start services fresh

dan958

Yes, you should shut your PC down. This gives it chance to do any updates, clear any memory, clear any processes that may have been running and dont need to anymore etc.

Throw an SSD in your PC, and it will take a few seconds to boot, so there is no need to not shut down each night.

EveryWhere

dan958 wrote: »

Yes, you should shut your PC down. This gives it chance to do any updates, clear any memory, clear any processes that may have been running and dont need to anymore etc.

Throw an SSD in your PC, and it will take a few seconds to boot, so there is no need to not shut down each night.

Thirded. But I'm sure that you will do nothing.

JJ_Egan

Updates when shut down ??


I turn off due to fire risk more than anything and yes i have had a PSU go bang .

dan958

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Updates when shut down ??.

Yes, Windows updates are applied when you shutdown/restart.

parkrunner

My PC shuts down automatically after I think 60 minutes if it's been idle for that long.

wongataa

parkrunner wrote: »

My PC shuts down automatically after I think 60 minutes if it's been idle for that long.

No it doesn't. It is either goes to sleep or hibernate.

Norman_Castle

britishboy wrote: »

i usually leave my home PC on all night as i have 5 or 6 tabs open on internet explorer, no idea why i do, just habit i guess.


When i log back on in the morning it seems to take forever for everytihng to 'catch up' with itself, is this normal?


Should i just shut it right down every evening instead?

Not sure about ie but probably the same, with firefox you can open the tabs you want open then set that as the homepage, when it starts the tabs will be open.
Remove as much as possible from start up.

A.Penny.Saved

I use standby a great deal and rarely shutdown my PC. My PC has been running for over 5 days so far since I last rebooted.

It is more convenient to keep it in standby and have everything where it is ready for me to go back to than to have to boot and open all the software from fresh.

The only other alternative would be hibernation but that uses a lot of SSD space which I do not want to allocate. It's slower too.

victor2

I hibernate my PC whenever it's not in use to minimise power usage as much as anything - the power switch is set to hibernate. A scheduled backup job wakes it up in the wee hours, performs the backup and hibernates again. If I'm going to be away and don't want it running, I do a full shutdown, that also stops the scheduled job starting the PC.

Every now and then I do a restart to clean things up.