Weizhong wrote:
>
> hi,
>
> a silly question: should I turn off the computer at night? I've let my
> linux box kept on running for a week so far without any problem. Which is
> good to the machine itself, on or off at idle time, if electricity bill is
> not an issue?
>
> thx,
>
> Weizhong
I leave mine on 24-7 for the last year with out any ill effects.
Some say it can actucally harm a computer to keep turning it on and
off. See when the computer starts, all hard drives, need to get from 0
RPM up to ~75,000 RPM in less than a couple seconds. This sucks ALOT of
wattage from your power supply, which over time it can hurt it. Plus it
has to feed power to the cpu, memory, cards, fans, etc. etc at the same
time.
On the other side though a power supply only cost $25 bucks, plus it
takes years for them to go bad, I got one that is 10 years old and still
in use.
For the monitor it is a good idea to hit the power switch on em, if you
know you are going to be away for a few hours, to sleep for example, hit
the swith on the monitor.
*nix by nature, likes to be on 24 -7, most of them run crontab jobs to
clean up in the wee hours in the morning, if they aren't wake, err on,
to clean up log files, this can cause ill effects over time, like
finding a 100 meg log file !
Plus isn't it just annonying to go and check you email and you have to
wait 15 minutes for it to go though all its rc scripts? Oh, and another
good thing about leaving your computer on 24-7 is you can running
setiathome while it is idel :)
Make sure you have proper cooling and filtering for your system, keep
the monitor off when not in use and it will be fine.
