Is it better to turn off your computer at night?

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 11:49pm, Sunday 11 January 2009.

My family has been trying to do more "green" things and this includes powering off lights when leaving rooms and turning off unused electronics. This will likely save us a little "green" as well.

I come from the old school and have always heard through my geek friends that computers are best left on and turning off/on causes undue stress on components and leads to shorter life. This sounds like it could be true for things like a hard drive, since you hear it hitting the drive the hardest when starting up, though doesn't seem to make sense from an electronics standpoint since you would think the longer a component has power flowing it would have less life.

I have some personal experience with computer failure, though the servers we use at work are much higher-end and were made for longer life to begin with. So I don't think it would be fair to compare this equipment to a low-end home computer that also typically has more unexpected turnoffs, such as power failure. We also use an industrial UPS system at work that provides very clean power to our servers which I can only guess really adds to the life of the systems.

I ran a quick search and saw this link which appears to be responses from computer manufactures on this question.

http://www.energy.unsw.edu.au/unswitch/experts.html

I would be interested to hear what others say about this.

Powering down (at least for now)
-Allan

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•