I'm on an environmental panel at work, and I was charged with finding out if we had to leave PCs on overnight (for updates or anything), or whether we could have a policy of switching them off to save energy. Then someone threw in the opinion that its better to leave them on, due to the temperature changes caused by the powering up/down which causes the machine to fail earlier.
Is this a red herring, or do they have a point?
Where I work they put up signs saying leaving a monitor on overnight produces enough electricity to microwave 6 meals. They should know being a power company and all.
It's a red herring for all intents & purposes
there may be a marginal difference but that's about it
I've seen at least 2 fires caused by PCs
Unless you reboot each morning anyway - apps are going to slow down
We have to power all our desktops down overnight - but due to security reasons not environmental ones.
Red herring!
arse - switch it off!
i used to have to take my hard drive out and lock it in a safe.
now i just power down apart from tonight where i've left it on crunching some numbers.
Yeah complete bollocks IMO. Desktop PCs are designed to be switched on and off.
I understood that monitors should be switched off, but didn't know about PCs. uplink - I hadn't thought of the fire aspect, or the need to reboot. good point and thanks.
It'll be worse leaving them on as they really don't like high temperatures for long periods.
Turn them off, just for the energy savings alone.
fadda - the contention that switching on/off daily affected the life of a PC used to be the case. However that point was passed years ago. You can get utilities which will switch the PC off at a predetermined time. With a proper Systems Management utility in place, you can have them switch off, switch on, upgrade, then switch off again, all unmanned.
They're designed to be switched on and off. It does indeed shorten their life, but only to their design life - not to an unreasonably short time, and they're better than they were. It's primarily down to the caps in the powersupply AFAIK, rapid deep charging and discharging of the electrolytic caps isn't helpful for them, they prefer to remain charged but dont like warm temps either. They're rated at something like 15 years at 40 odd degrees. But as I say, they're designed to be turned on and off daily, so it should not increase deaths unless your company holds onto PCs much longer than they should!
The major source of failure on computers is PSUs and hard drives, hard drives dont like being hot - thats a case design problem and overnight they'll be cooler than during the working day, and again they're not keen on being started and stopped but its not really a factor in their life. Google completed a test on millions of their drive failures and found most of them died, IIRC, because of heat problems, not related to power-ons.
Ultimately the answer is turn them off if possible, hibernate if you need a fast boot.
Leaving a computer on doesn't slow apps down these days, my system was running for 2 months (XP pro) until yesterday without powerdown (its also a license server) and after reboot it was no different - thats a problem from the old windows 98 days.
Decent software is available to do the trick. Free software is available to. But it'd be better from a network point of view.
Maybe from 20 years down to 15. But it'll be obselete in 3 anyway so who cares?
they really don't like high temperatures for long periods
They won't be running hot if the're just sitting there not processing or accessing the HDD and network.
I still think power cycles cause more stress than leaving them on all the time. Whether the effect is significant in producing more failures over the life of the PC vs the extra power used I have no idea, but if there is any effect then switching them off at the end of work then powering them up and down with wake-on-LAN to apply patches and updates will only make it worse.
I still think power cycles cause more stress than leaving them on all the time.
this is irrelevant - it's still hugely wasteful!
They won't be running hot if the're just sitting there not processing or accessing the HDD and network.
Assuming that the Power Options are set up suitably so that the HDD shuts down and the CPU is capable of clocking itself downs. And that there are no background network tasks running (DNS, NetBIOS, ping etc) or virus scanning, updates, defrag, scheduled jobs etc.
Well my work are sending me on a 2 hour 'energy awareness' course tomorrow so I may get the definitive answer....yes, I do work for a local authority....
One of my bugbears at work is people leaving their monitors switched on standby when they leave the office. In my team in particular, we can sometimes be out of the office for up to a week between visits. So I routinely turn off any monitor that I see with the standby light lit up. I'm hoping the message might get through to everyone one day...but I certainly wont be holding my breath for this to happen!
Your PC is still using probabably 100W or so.....same as you are. Turn it off!
Remember your office is empty for around 75% of a year.
Hibernate the thing, no boot-up needed.
Seems like the concensus is to switch off - big thanks everyone.
momo: some monitors allow you to set a scheduled time when they will turn themselves off. Our HP ones do. Might be worth look at this if co-workers are being slack.
Your PC is still using probabably 100W or so....
More like 175W these days
In our office we mostly use laptops. Power off and lock in the drawer over night for security. But this leaves the transformer on over night which still drawing power. Option is to crawl under the desk and pull the plug !!! Not sure about desktops in other offices - I think most people power them off. If updates take place then they happen over night if possible otherwise during the day. With laptops we have to be on the network for a three (?) hour period over two weeks to get the upgrade. Would like to have a master switch for each block of desks which you can just flick off when you're the last one to leave - makes sure all power is off.
At home I measured the current draw of all my pc stuff - printer, external hard drive, PC, monitor, surround sound amp, router etc. The printer was drawing current when plugged in but turned off !!!! So now everything is turned off at the wall.
Option is to crawl under the desk and pull the plug.. Would like to have a master switch for each block of desks which you can just flick off....
Plug your laptops in via these:
Then when you leave press this:
and they'll all be switched off at the plug.
hibernate
I still think power cycles cause more stress than leaving them on all the time.
this is irrelevant - it's still hugely wasteful!
Well, you could be right, but I don't think you know any such thing - got some numbers to go with that bold assertion?
I'm presuming you've looked at the net costs to the environment of any premature hardware failure (manufacturing costs for replacement, recycling, landfill, toxic by-products etc) vs your calculations on the energy saving?
Option is to crawl under the desk and pull the plug !!
that sounds a little pathetic - just crawl once and plug into an extension you can reach to unplug 
I still think power cycles cause more stress than leaving them on all the time.this is irrelevant - it's still hugely wasteful!
Well, you could be right, but I don't think you know any such thing - got some numbers to go with that bold assertion?
well, electronic component failure over time is a bathtub curve. it fails early on in life or goes on for a goodly while. HDs are bit different, obviously, but how many of those have you had go down on a three year old pc? ( which is usually the commercial lifespan of a pc, unless you work for a company like ours 
)
yes, off and onning can bring about earlier failure for a component that is likely to fail, but in that instance it's also likely the manufacturer will be coffing up under warranty, so the cost to the consumer is minimal.
given the fact that most modern pcs are capable of keeping an office of three warm ( assuming they use a pc each ), i think we can safely assume they are consuming enough power to make it worth our while switching them off, don't you? even in standby, they're not doing any actual work, so kill 'em!
how many of those have you had go down on a three year old pc? ( which is usually the commercial lifespan of a pc, unless you work for a company like ours )
Mind you somebody did the calc that the time we wasted waiting for computers to shut down and boot up cost the company more than the money saved in not powering computers all night (though we have to shut down for other reasons anyway)!
Mind you somebody did the calc that the time we wasted waiting for computers to shut down and boot up cost the company more than the money saved in not powering computers all night
So just get the first person in to switch on all the machines?
I'd like to see those sums though. Boot time is what.. a minute maybe?
Are you really paid so much that a minute of your time is more than the cost of running a PC for the 15 hours a day you're not using it?
We have the timer switches on a bunch of other stuff; monitors, photocopier, printers, faxes, speakers, microwave and hot water service in the kitchen etc that don't have any updates or such that they need to stay on for. For what you doing with an enviro panel, I think you'll find a whole bunch of stuff you can power down not just the PCs
Personally, shutdown my PC and monitor - I'm changing out of bike gear from the commute or going to get coffee/tea etc whilst it is re-booting, so no extra wasted time so to speak.
Same with lights; We have signs on all of them so that they are turned off when not in use etc.
So just get the first person in to switch on all the machines?I'd like to see those sums though. Boot time is what.. a minute maybe?
Are you really paid so much that a minute of your time is more than the cost of running a PC for the 15 hours a day you're not using it?
Boot time with our machines is rather more than a minute - I'd guess 5 is about normal! Meanwhile it's not so much what they pay us as what our charge out rate is, since that's supposedly what 5 minutes wasted costs the company.
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