Do you switch off your Desktop PC when not in use?

[toejamfootball]

Just curious how many people don't shutdown when they're not using their PC?

I switch mine off, but know a couple of people who don't.

[mr.propre]

I even turn of my screen (not in standby) and my speakers.

[amitabhishek]

When I used desktop I always did. 60% of the power is consumed during operation and 40% of the power is consumed when the machine is in standby state. Its something not very green.

[doorman]

I never turn it off. It' just a matter of laziness - when I come home I like it ready and waiting for me to do stuff :P

[suitedaces]

Yeah, but it's running XP, quite old and underpowered, and is offline, so I very rarely turn it on!

[haemulon]

Occasionally I'll leave it on, but most of the time I do turn it off.

I know it's wasteful leaving it on and I feel a bit guilty when I do.

[aeiah]

after work ill turn it on. i wont bother turning it off when im cooking dinner or something, but i do turn it off at night, when i go out, when im at work etc. i turn it off at the wall too, since that also means my hdtv isnt on standby sucking power.

[toejamfootball]

Cool guys. I should get into the habit of switching my screen off completely. I should be more energy conscious. I would turn my tower off completeley but I think the battery is dead, it doesnt remember certain BIOS settings if I turn it off at the back..... *shrugs*

[Eisenwinter]

I turn it off usually when I go to work or sleep every few days.

[.Maleficus.]

Mine's got some fans and lights that I'd rather not have disturbing my sleep, so yeah, I turn mine off.

[Nevon]

My desktop computer is semi-offline (the wireless adapter sucks, so I lose my connection ALL THE TIME in Linux), old and noisy, so I rarely even turn it on.

[Arkenzor]

What about a "I put it on standby" option? That's what I do all the time.

[3rdalbum]

I suspend mine but lately I've been forgetting and just press "Shut Down".

I don't suspend to be green, I just do it because the cost of keeping it on can add up, and I pay a third of the electricity bill here. I suspend rather than shut down, so that I can be up and running again within seconds.

[tjwoosta]

mine are both on 24/7, mostly because they are always busy doing something


i dont like to waste bandwidth

[sydbat]

Unless you are turning off your box for more than 24 hours at a time, you won't notice any real decrease in power consumption. Even then, it is negligible. And, unless your box is really old which might increase power consumption if running all the time, turning it on and off constantly can create less than favourable hardware conditions.

It could be different elsewhere, but I have never found an up or down spike in our power bill. When we go away for a week or two (sometimes more...don't worry, we have someone come in at least once a day to feed/play with our cat), and I turn off the computer, the subsequent power bill has no discernible change from the ones when the box is running 24/7. And the person coming in everyday does not use our computer, or watch TV, or do anything that uses lots of power.

Same for the other utilities (gas, water, etc), which you would logically expect from reduced usage.

Therefore, I believe it is a myth that turning off your computer every night (or whenever you are not using it) really "saves power".

[MikeTheC]

Unless it's doing something for me while I'm away, I turn it off.

[SuperSonic4]

If I'm doing something or it's less than half an hour I leave it on but if not then I shut it down

If I need to download overnight (like an iso) I'll use the laptop

[billgoldberg]

I leave it on during the day, sometimes switch of during the night.

[wolfen69]

i seed linux .iso's 24/7, so no, i don't shut it off.


i dont like to waste bandwidth
neither do i. i have unlimited bandwidth, so i may as well give back to the linux community in the form of torrents.

[doas777]

laptops yes, desktops no

[N310]

I ussualy leave it on at home, they have a very restrictive Internet access here at work (That crap called Websense) so I use NX to log at home and do all sorts of stuff.

>Screenshot< (http://i41.tinypic.com/bbqyw.jpg)

[BrokenKingpin]

I shut my laptop down every night. I sometimes leave my desktop on over night, but I usually shut that down at night as well. I have a server computer I leave on 24/7.

[richg]

I turn of the PC and LCD dislpay every day. Normally my display shuts down after five minutes of no activity.
My external back up hard drive is off until I have to back up files, maybe once a week.
If I go out for a couple hours, PC and display turned off. Been doing this for over eight years.

Rich

[spupy]

I haven't left my laptop fully shutdown for months. If I don't need it - suspend it. Hibernation takes ages with 2GB of RAM. Full shutdown is not an option since at a fresh boot the sound is infuriatingly low, it just turn back up after a day or two. Suspend to ram is whoa-fast.

Strictly speaking, it is shutdown at night, unless I need to update packages (it's Gentoo, so takes a while), after which goes to sleep again, or if I really need to download some movi... err, linux distro.

[Cope57]

Do you switch off your Desktop PC when not in use?

My desktop is always in use, even when I am not using it.

It is a web server and multiple game servers.
My website and a few others. As for game servers, it hosts Tremulous, Warsow, and Nexuiz games.

It is using the boinc client for 3 projects.
http://www.boincstats.com/signature/team_banner_bam28957.png (http://boincstats.com/stats/boinc_team_graph.php?pr=bo&id=33433)

http://distributedcomputing.info/images/dcinfo_banner_468_60_001.jpg (http://distributedcomputing.info)

It is also hosting 20-30 Linux torrents from LinuxTracker (http://linuxtracker.org).

So no, my PC is not shut down when I do not use it.

[Newuser1111]

Do you switch off your Desktop PC when not in use?Some of them.

[binbash]

Current uptime 35 days : )

[mamamia88]

only time i ever shut down my laptop is when the fan gets too loud and i just leave it off for 10 minutes or so and the fan is quiet.

[Christmas]

Never. My PC runs non-stop for years now. I used to have medium uptimes of over 10 days, but since now I dual-boot Debian Lenny and Kubuntu 9.04 I have to restart it once in a while.

[RandomJoe]

I used to be in the "never" camp, but have recently become more aware of power consumption. Not for the typical "green / environmental" reasons, but from a production angle. It costs a LOT of money to produce my own power! Much easier to conserve in the first place.

Not that I'm completely off-grid. I have a small subset of things in my home (ham bench, small computer, lighting) that I run off-grid with wind/solar power just because it's a fun challenge. And it provides some backup should we have another long outage. But I started looking around and watching how much I really do use. A large chunk of my consumption was in always-on but seldom-used computers!

Now I just fire up whichever machine I want to use when I want to use it, otherwise leave it off. My only always-on system now is a mini-ITX style Atom-based system. Pulls all of 25W at full tilt and has plenty of horsepower for what I have it doing.