You'll get two views, diametricly opposed to each other.

One camp thinks leaving a computer and its drives on all the time does no serious harm and actually may have some benefit because you're avoiding the stress of the components 'heating up', cooling down and heating up again during warm-up when you turn things off and on.

The other camp feels leaving your computer run all the time only makes the parts that can fail wear out that much faster due to stress of it always running.

My view is neither camp is 100% right. While the support chips and CPU, even the tiny resistors and capictors may benefit or at least suffer no harm by having the low electrical current they operate with run through them 24/7, your mechanical parts in your hard drive may suffer just like a car engine running none stop due to friction. While more damage of course occurs if the drive is busy reading/writing data like say a drive on some popular web server that never gets a rest and is constantly moving its internal parts around while a drive not really in use because you're sleeping or otherwise occupied and it simply is spinning and nothing else probably isn't harmed as much if at all.

I think it really comes down to how you use your computer. For me, its the first thing I switch on in the morning and the last thing I turn off before going to bed. So its mostly on, anywhere from 14-18 a day, every day. I don't leave it on constantly unless its doing a long render.

So I suppose you could say it has a daily stress of warming up, but I'm not turning if off and on all day long which would be more stressful.. So really I don't think it matters that much. Just avoid turning off and on constantly all day long.

Thanks BillyBoy and DGrob. I turn on my computer every morning and off each night. It stays on all day. Even though the external drive runs into the same surge protector and I could just turn off the main power on the surge protector, my phone is plugged into it so I don't. Since it is easy for me to access the back of the external drive, I simply unplug the power cord from the back of the external drive and then put it back in the next morning - that is, when I do it. I don't know if and how often I should do it. Maybe I should just treat it the same as I treat my computer and do it every time I shut down my computer?

JCG

Actually, unless you run two identical computer set-ups side by side, one with the drive on and one with the drive off, you'll really never know the answer. So do what I do--assume that you've made the right decision and return to the Vegas editing.

There is one other view Billy boy, that of not wasting power on a machine thats left on and not being used.

I would think that if power saving features were set to kick on maybe after an hour, a lot of the advantage of turning the PC off goes away. If drives spin down, there's no mechanical wear. Then you only waste a little power and the most wear that happens is on the fans, which are cheap.

A couple years ago I ran a BBS. I kept the computer on for 2 1/2 years straight (not counting reboots) with 2 exceptions: when the powersupply fan died, and when windows died. It was a p-mmx 200, 16mb ram, 2gb HD. Not one component failed durring htat time (well, the left mouse button stopped clicking, but that was it). I didn'tr have any power save features on (they interfeared with the BBS software) and was running windows 95.

I just had to re-boot ocationatly because windows 95 would crap out on me, but that was it.

That computer STILL works today, except I blew out the USB ports, PS/2 ports, and the hard drive was sold a while ago. But the motherboard still works. Infact, I stopped using it 4 months ago. :)

You can also look at it like this: by the time the part wears out (hard drive, CPU, memory, etc) it will be years down the road and you will of upgraded by then. Of course having the monitor turn off after 15-30 minutes of nonuse is a good idea. Give mother earth a break! :)

I let my computers sleep when I do. Seems only fair. <wink>

Anybody having bad luck with their *UPS? I've had two die already in the last couple years. Kind of defeats the purpose of having the darn things. The last one was rated at 600 watts and I only had this PC plugged into it.


* for those not sure, nope, not those brown trucks.... this is a
uninterruptible power supply that has a battery and gives you a chance to shut down if the power goes out.

If you work with Windows XP Pro/Home, you may selectively allow the entire system to go into stand-by mode (including all disks) or to spin down just the disks when the system stays idle longer than a specific period. These settings can be found in the Power Options control panel.

Upon resume from either type of setting, there's a brief delay (but no where near as long as booting a system from power on) before the system is completely available for normal operations.

I tend to not plug-unplug my disks and peripherals. This is prone to jiggering the entire device while the disk heads may still be in flight. HDDs are very robust in this regard, but any unnecessary physical rough/tumbling handling of the device increases the risk of damage.

--svb

My system has stayed up for 2 1/2 years straight. Wait; I have turned it off when I've been away on vacation ("holiday" to you foreigners) for a week or two. The CRT shuts down after an hour of nonuse. I used to have the disks spool down during inactivity, but the 5-second lag coming back up would bug me. Everything else stays up. Nothing has failed.

Actually, the room in which the system is installed is a bit on the cold side (this is Oregon, after all) and the ~150w of heat helps to keep the chills away. Aside from the energy consumption, I can't think of any reason to shut down, and the bit about thermal cycling is true. I remember the Apple III had a problem when it first came out with RAM chips gradually loosening over time; as I recall, they concluded it was because of thermal cycling making things expand/contract ever so slightly.

On my laptop I use a wonderful feature called "Hibernate." The system reads the entire contents of RAM into the hard drive, and then completely shuts down. Bringing the system back to life takes only a few seconds and no power is used in the interim, unlike "Standby," where the RAM is kept alive. The OS is XP, and I think Hibernate is also on wME?

I set my drives to automatically power down after 30 minutes via Windows XP power management.

Works great!

BillyBoy is right, it's very hard to give a definative answer. In general the electronic gismos are more prone to dying during startup. Mechanical things like HDs, well mostly these days they use air bearings so there's no wear there either.

But those el cheapo fans are another matter entirely. Many of them just don't last, the good ones go forever, the crapy ones wear out way too fast. But there's another side to this not mentioned yet. The whole time the thing is on unless you've made an effort to stop this yourself, your PC is doing a wonderful job of filtering the air in the room. Probably you'd appreciate it if you're an asthmatic but the gadgets inside the box are slowly choking as the crud builds up blocking the airflow which is supposed to help keep them clean

The airflow is supposed to keep them cool, not clean (I suspect that's what you meant). But crud needs to build up a LOT to become a real problem. If a PC is on 24/7, it still shouldn't need more than a few minutes of cleaning once a year. Having said that, I LIKE mine clean, and have filters on the intake fans.

What I meant was your PC is acting as an air filter the room, sorry tryong to be sarcastic but it didn't work.

It's not just the issue though of cooling, becuse th eoriginal design was that the case has negative air pressure every hole and gap lets air and dirt in. My biggest concern is things like the DVD burner, it would only take the smallest bit of fluff to stop the laser burning properly.

So add an extra intake fan or 2; whatever it takes to make it a positive air pressure case. Then stick filters in front of the fans, and the dust concern is gone.

As you see, there are several opinions on this and no definitive answers.

I figure that the jolt of startup is the most wearing on any electronic or mechanical device.

FWIW, I have had computer-based editing systems for over ten years. They have always run 24/7 with no apparent ill effects.

In fact one exception to the above was when I went on a trip for a couple of weeks and decided to power down. After I got back and turned everything on again, I started have trouble with both computer and drives.

Gary

The whole point is you never know what's going to happen.

If you use the built-in power saving feature of Windows, your drives may be taking a beating spinning up and down constantly depending on the settings and your work habits.

If you turn your computer off and on all day long during a cycle of cold start ups that too isn't good.

If you leave everything turned on in your system it likely will wear out faster. Those mean time failure averages DO mean something. Anything mechanical or electronic sooner or later will fail and running equipment you're not using for hours and hours at a stretch seems at least on the surface foolish because of the stress its under when you're not getting any benefit from it.

That's why I'm a little paranoid and redundant with backups. Anything worth doing is worth keeping and I keep 3 copies of all the good stuff on three different types of media, DV tape, DVD disc and on a hard drive. I reason the odds of all three copies failing at the same time are so astronomical, it ain't going to happen. I sleep very well not worrying about it. Thanks. ;-)

My external drives and Sony DRX external burners are switched off unless they are needed. I have an internal A03 and a dedicated IDE media drive so I guess I am doing my part to conserve energy by switching off unused devices. Same at work: the BetaSX online suite is not powered up unless someone is going to use it.