Desktop Shutdown

[eytonxav]

I generally turn my iMac off at night, but perhaps this is not a good idea. What do our IT gurus suggest?

 

[braumeister]

Apart from occasional restarts, I haven't turned my computer off in decades. I like letting it do its multiple daily backups while I sleep.

 

[Aerides]

I put mine in sleep mode, vs. shutdown, to save electricity, and to avoid the light and noise as the office is across the hall from our bedroom. I only power all the way off if going out of town or for updates or if it's glitching.

My tablets I don't shut down unless I'm packing them for a flight.

 

[RobbieB]

I shut down about once a week otherwise sleep mode. For updates I select update and shut off and then go have lunch.

 

[steelyman]

I rarely shut my iMac down. It’s nearly noiseless (SSD) except for the two external Time Machine backup hard drives that awaken every hour or so to do their appointed duties (usually nothing).

If I were to shut it down I’d lose access to the music library throughout the home.

 

[jim584672]

I shut mine down, trying to save some $$$ on low drain devices.

 

[MRG]

I never turn mine off and reboot at least every daylight saving time.

I still remember a large client, early PC adopters . I was there on some kind of disaster when a well meaning vendor mentioned having turned off some PCs. The local lan support guy went nutty, full bore meltdown, and demanded to know what machines because they shouldn't ever be turned off and had to be turned on immediately before the disk drives seized!

It was late at night and people were getting loud and stupid. I thought he was kind of the leader for a while. Turns out about 20% of these antique drives wouldn't spin back up. I watched as angry lan guy ripped each drive out of a dustbunny packed PC beating it on the desk and slamming it back together in an attempt to get it spinning. IIRC he got enough spinning with a few spares to save the night. The look on the straight laced vendor's face was absolute disbelief. I'm sure he had some new stories for the lab guys.

 

[Ronstar]

I'm not an IT guru, but I never shut off my Mac. I'm not sure, but I suspect that it needs to be on to do time machine backups.

 

[ejman]

I turn everything off as I lay me down to sleep. I always wish for my PC's and laptops to have wonderful dreams and wake up in the morning reinvigorated from a good night sleep. So far it seems to work OK.

 

[Ian S]

I have my desktop PC set to go to sleep after 3 hours. That seems to work well.

 

[mpeirce]

Do what you like.

The amount of energy/money saved either way is negligible. Wear and tear with modern solid state computers is also negligible.

Seriously, nothing bad will happen either way.

 

[RetiredAt55.5]

At work, we always left them on because the LAN admins would push out software updates at night.

At home, I turn them off daily, not so much to save on electricity but because when the pc's on the fan basically acts as an air filtration device (collecting more dust inside the pc), and also to give the non-SSD hard drives and power supply a rest. All 3 components still have a mean time before failure.

Someone that's hyper security conscious could argue it's more secure to turn off a computer when it's not being used, rather than having it online 24x7.

 

[Jerry1]

For no particular reason, I’ve always shut down my equipment most every night. Probably just habit. My computer doesn’t have a fan, so it’s not because of noise. The monitor shuts down after an hour so energy use is not an issue. It does seem like giving the machine a restart regularly is good for the operating and update process. But, it’s just habit for me to shut it down at night.

 

[Qs Laptop]

I shut down every night for the same reasons RetiredAt55.5 listed--components like hard drives and power supplies (and cooling fans)--have failure rates based on hours of use. Also heat is the enemy of electronic components so why have add to the stress by leaving the PC on 24/7? Another thing that could damage your computer if it is on 24/7 is power surges.

 

[stephenson]

Hmmm ... I don’t think any of the usual money/power saving logic works with computers - they have jobs to do and shutting them down simply forces them to do do their jobs during shorter periods of time.

They’re sort of like dogs - when you’re not there, they just sleep.

 

[USGrant1962]

About 30 years ago my office building took a lightning strike overnight and it fried all of the serial ports on the network printers. I bought a damaged HP Laserjet III from the company for cheap and used on on the parallel port for a decade. But ever since then, my computers are off over night and when we are away.

My server stays on all the time and I don't even notice when it does the automatic backups of each PC.

 

[Freedom56]

I shut down all my computers when they are not in use. We have three desktops and three laptops. Unless you are performing background tasks all the time, there is no reason to leave it on.

Here are seven good reasons why you should turn off your computer(s).

https://www.smokeball.com/blog/7-reasons-why-you-should-shut-off-your-computer-every-day/

 

[W2R]

Do what you like.

The amount of energy/money saved either way is negligible. Wear and tear with modern solid state computers is also negligible.

Seriously, nothing bad will happen either way.

+1

I don't shut down my Windows 10 laptop at night. When I close it, the screen shuts off after a few minutes.

While I sleep, it downloads those infamous Windows 10 updates and then I install them later when it's convenient.

 

[easysurfer]

On my Win 10 desktop, at night I put the PC to hibernate. Middle of the night, the PC runs scheduled nightly Macrium Reflect data and system backups then goes back to hibernate til I manually wake up the PC.

 

[misanman]

We rarely shutdown any of our computers. I would guess we bought the oldest about ten years ago and I never shut it down unless there is a power outage (it's on a UPS) in which case I shut it down gracefully as eventually the UPS will run out of backup power.

 

[eytonxav]

The main reason I shut down at night is more about concern of some nefarious actor doing something that I may not be aware of, plus I am never on it after 7:00 PM. I suppose that may be an unfounded fear.

 

[easysurfer]

The main reason I shut down at night is more about concern of some nefarious actor doing something that I may not be aware of, plus I am never on it after 7:00 PM. I suppose that may be an unfounded fear.

Probably unfounded fear as long as your computer is set up with updated security. But, I do something similar. I don't shut down at night but have set to hibernate so the computer can do the scheduled backups.

But before hibernation, I make sure that any Veracrypt volumes are dismounted and my password manager is closed as don't want some intruder poking around as I'm snoozing away in bed .

 

[donheff]

I reboot my Windows PC every now and then and am forced to do it with some updates. Otherwise its just sleep mode. I had a linux server in the basement that had an uptime for several years.

 

[jollystomper]

I never shutdown my main desktop and half of my servers, other than for hardware maintenance. I reboot as needed to pick up operating system updates. The other servers I run based on what projects I am working on. All of these computers are on APC power units that have yet to let me down.

My laptops I don't use as often so I let them go into suspend mode when I am not using them.

 

[brett]

The only time we turn the PC off is when we go on an extended trip 2-3 months.