do you turn off your computer or leave it on?

Turning it off if you're not using it saves electricity but won't make a difference as far as viruses are concerned. You get viruses from opening infected email, going to infected sites with an insecure browser, stuff like that. They don't juse wander the internet looking for computers that are left on.

I leave mine on all the time because I stay logged into IRC 24/7. Otherwise I'd probably turn it off.

Michelle

I turn it off to save energy. On the weekends I try to remember to shut off my power bar before I leave work (because most appliances continue to suck energy even while they're turned off). At home I sometimes tend to leave my computer on on the weekends when I'm on and off it all the time, but I'm trying to be more realizstic about how long I'm going to be away - if it's more than an hour I'll shut it off.

If I'm going to be away for more than an hour, I hibernate mine. Rarely do I actually shut it off, usually only when an update requires a restart. I never go to standby.

Interesting topic though is the people who insist on "turning off" a monitor anymore. probably 98% of the monitors that auto "standby" (shut off the display) when they detect no video signal, use the same circuits to detect you press the power button to turn it on. We did a test on a few monitors before watching the current usage, same when "off" as in standby (other than the very very tiny amount to light that LED on the front to tell you it is in standby).

-Greg

PS. Show your age, who remembers waiting several minutes for a TV to "warm up" before you could watch it?

My mac monitors don't even have an off button.

Greg, did you find that they were still sucking power when in "off" mode (or could you find that???). That's what I'm concerned about... I never did shut monitors off before I had these though. I'd always forget it was off when I went to use it again and wonder why the screen was still black.

We used to have a TV that took time to warm up like that. It also had kind of a greenish tint to the picture....

Modern monitors (and electronics) still sill use power even when "off". Compare older computers with a mechanical on/off switch to newer ones. Older computers (pc's anyhow) when you turned off the computer, it was actually breaking the connection of your AC to the power supply. If you ever worked on one, you saw you had wires going straight from the power supply to the power switch (or really old ones, the switch was in the power supply).

Newer systems (and monitors and such) there is some type of circuit that is constantly drawing power, which looks for the pressing of the power button. Now, don't get me wrong, this is WAY less power than the item fully turned on and working, but still using power, and like I said in the case of monitors, the same circuit is what checks for a video signal to go into "standby" mode, which is most likely the same mode it is in when off.

So in general, it is still a good idea if you are wanting to save power to shut off your equipment, however most monitors in use now will auto go into standby mode when they don't detect a video signal, which is most likely the same energy saving as shutting it off. This is why in windows under "Power Settings", you can set it how long to wait to shut off the monitor. It doesn't' actually shut it off, it just stops sending a video signal so it in effect shuts off.

-Greg

I thought the main reason people left their computer on was so that the hard drive didn't wear out? I think it was something about turning on the computer really gives a nice yank on the disk, but I'm not sure.

I always turn my computer off at night. I should probably just turn off the whole powerstrip because that'll shut down my printer, modem, router, and speakers too. Save a bit more power.

At work we used to have to leave our computers on overnight because they'd sometimes run upgrades in the middle of the night and the computers had to be on.

Greg - that's why I try to actually unplug my equipment before I leave for the weekend. I should really do it every night when I go home. When I said "shut off my power" above I should have said turn off the power bar or unplug it from the wall.

Turning off your computer may decreases the wear on your hardware WRT total runtime, but starting and stopping hard drives puts wear on them, too.

I usually turn off my computer at night in the summer because it uses energy and fights with the AC. In the winter, I will leave it on sometimes, especially when I have 80 million windows open.

Have you ever gone in and looked at your power settings on your computer (at least in windows), If I remember right, they default to shutting off the hard drives after like 30 minutes.

In the computer labs on campus, used to find computers sitting there with like 4 browser windows open, or other multiple windows, with no one there... Impatient (well more unknowing) students... They come in, sit down at the computer which has been idle for over 30 minutes. They click on a program, and because it took about 20 seconds for the drives to spin up and "turn on", they would keep clicking on program becasue nothing came up in that 30 seconds. Then when everything pops up when the drive kicks in, they move to another one thinking something must be wrong. LOL

(students in a computer labs can be entertaining... except for then they kept shoving floppy disks into the zip drives, even AFTER we pulled each zip drive and painted the faceplate red).

-Greg

Let me put it this way:
07:27:01 up 27 days, 6 min, 3 users, load average: 0.42, 0.28, 0.23

haha no, I don't turn off my computer, last time it rebooted was 27 days ago

I think this will become a mythbusters type thread... I do turn-off my computer after 12 hours...

A high percentage of PC hardware problems occur at power-on surge.
However, I turn off the PC at night, and also for the lunch break.