Continuous running of desktop pc - advisable?

GreenNotM

When I started doing my reply - it would have been the fifth, by the time I hit submit there was all the others :rotfl:

So my edit was to the others not just to you Robt - didn't mean any confusion.. :beer:

But 120 a year is a lot .....

Charlton_King

Thought I'd resurrect this thread as I've discovered an option on my new Dell Start programme which offers a 'sleep' mode - it claims to be a low power state.

I'm wondering whether this might be a reasonable compromise short of shutting down and just how much power is actually 'saved'.

Any ideas?

fwor

Yes - I would say that it probably is a good compromise.

There are several variants - some defined as "Standby" where your current machine state is stored (typically via "suspend to RAM") and then everything is shut down except the memory refresh circuits and a few other bits and pieces.

The other main type is "Hibernate", where your current machine state is stored on the Hard Disk, and that requires very little if any power - but the downside is that it takes longer to reload when you power up.

I used to use Standby on both my PCs when they were running Windows, but sadly under Linux, one won't go into Standby (or more accurately it will but won't wake up) and the other is a PVR which needs to be awake all the time!

albertross_2

Servers generally need to be on 24/7, pc's (cars, TV's, washing machines, lights) generally don't, unless of course you're running a program to generate climate change.

fwor

albertross wrote: »

Servers generally need to be on 24/7, pc's (cars, TV's, washing machines, lights) generally don't, unless of course you're running a program to generate climate change.

Yeah - that produced quite a lot of contentious traffic on the Climate Change Experiment forums!

Especially when after many months of processing by (IIRC) more than a million people around the world, they discovered that they had screwed up the model input parameters, and that every model would crash when 80+% of the way through. I hate to think how many billions of CPU cycles and MW of energy were wasted due to that c0ckup...

Poppycat

I use to run a server 24/7 and I do every 3-4 months give pc a spring clean cleaning fans out etc. I also set each pc turning certain hard drives down if off if not needed and on main pc using it now I have the cpu fan on fan control software slowly fan down when no heavy work needed ie surfing etc

custardy

yup i have pc's running 24/7 and have done for years.components last a good life(3 years+)

superscaper

I don't leave lights on when I'm not in the room, I'm certainly not going to leave my pc on, which consumes far more power, when I'm not using it. The whole shortening the life of components by switching on and off is a bit of a myth nowadays TBH and nowhere near as big an effect as tends to be presumed. The effect is so small that you're more likely to have upgraded the components or replaced the pc by the time they would have failed. It'd only be relevant if you were excessively turning it off and on all the time.
http://www.deq.state.or.us/lq/pubs/factsheets/sw/ComputersMonitors.pdf

isofa

I've had no ill effects turning several Macs and PCs on and off each day for years and years and years. It definitely will add stress to the hard disc, an HD is far more likely to fail as it spins up, as this is the most stressful time for a moving component (from rest to spinning at high speed), but I've never experienced it, certainly not during the last 15 years or so.

Macs running OS X like to do their housekeeping tasks usually in the middle of the night (as they are based on always on Unix server systems), so download something like Onyx or Mainenance to run the housekeeping / maintance systems when you wish to keep everything running smoothly.

If you want your PCs to come on quickly you could put them to sleep rather than shutting down if you are going to use them later in the day, this keeps everything in RAM and powers down the other components and the hard disc (you need to leave it plugged in!), or hibernate, which saves the current state to a large file in the hard disc and then completely switch it off at the mains.

Certainly I always turn off all the other peripherals and the monitor whenever I'm not using systems.

If you need to access your PC remotely from another site / work, then obviously you'll need to leave it powered on with your internet router connected.

Charlton_King

If I may sum up the thread, then.

Power consumption aside, it all seems to revolve around whether or not the pc's life is shortened appreciably by, say, a couple of hundred boot ups per year.

Is there anything by way of hard facts on this? I certainly don't appreciate an earlier contributor's comment that a 'good life' (span) equals 3 years for continuous running mode. It seems to me that switch on/off mode could hardly be worse than that!