[MusicallyInspired]

I leave mine on all the time. I set my laptop to hibernate, but my desktop is on all the time. With scheduled defrags and update restarts to trigger in the middle of the night.

[Jeff]

I turn it off when I go to bed. Otherwise, it's on most of the time.

[Hendricks266]

I idle in IRC around the clock.

[The Commander]

I left my PC on 24/7 for the about the past 3 years.

[Mike Norvak]

Turn it off when I'm on shcool / work. Almost on all the time on vacation,

[Kathy]

Suspend mode when I'm not using it.

[Gambini]

I turn it off when im sleeping/working/away or with an errand that i know it will take more than an hour. Otherwise I leave it hibernating. It´s funny but sometimes I have to disconnect myself of using it by jus shutting it down. Doing other things and having your comp around distracts you everytime and you risk to get caught by whatever you´re doing in your pc and just forget about what other things you were doing. Sometimes is a good practice to shut it down just to not consider using it at the reach of your hand (you need to wait so windows starts and all), unless your expectations of life dont require time away from it.

I remember when i was a kid and the pc would be on use for 2 hours per day as much...

[The Commander]

HDs like being left on all the time.

[TerminX]

The Commander, on 04 January 2014 - 01:02 AM, said:

HDs like being left on all the time.

Yep, this. I think most disk failures occur during power on. Parking and unparking heads and fully spinning the motor down and back up again is a relatively "dangerous" operation on an aging drive versus just letting an already spinning motor continue to spin.

Keeping the drives cool is very important as well. I have two drives right now that I bought new which have 735xx hours of powered on time logged in SMART. That's about 8 and a half years of spinning, never mind any power outages or downtime for hardware upgrades or anything else.

[The Commander]

I think the only thing I've had to replace was the PSU so far.

[Gambini]

I used to leave my previous computer on much more than i do with this one, but it was too noisy and a waste of power because it was actually doing nothing for hours and hours. Some components of it were more than 5 years old and my kids are still using it without problems. It only refuses to accept two memories one in each slot, so instead of 3gb they have 2gb, but that´s their fault because they like to put their foot on the case and they shake it... This computer I have now goes back and forth from hibernating in no time, so I don´t think the HD´s life is worth all the other components life. Anyway... Everytime I want to access my 2nd HD it delays a bit because it´s stopped. Apparently W7 shuts down HDs that aren´t being used, so no advantage on that either.

[Mike Norvak]

Gambini, on 04 January 2014 - 08:34 AM, said:

Everytime I want to access my 2nd HD it delays a bit because it´s stopped. Apparently W7 shuts down HDs that aren´t being used, so no advantage on that either.

You can change that on Panel de Control -> Opciones de energía -> Cambiar la configuració ndel plan -> Configuración de energía avanzada...

[DNSKILL5]

I turn mine off when I'm not using it anymore (like if I'm going out, going to work, etc.). That's what I was raised to, "Tristan, don't leave the goddamn computer on when nobody's using it!" so even now when I have my own computers, my grandmother's voice still haunts me.

Also, my 2 desktops are ancient.

[Helixhorned]

TerminX, on 04 January 2014 - 07:05 AM, said:

Keeping the drives cool is very important as well. I have two drives right now that I bought new which have 735xx hours of powered on time logged in SMART. That's about 8 and a half years of spinning, never mind any power outages or downtime for hardware upgrades or anything else.

TX, do you know Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, the Google hard drive study? The results appear to disagree with your statement for new drives, but agree with it for older ones (section 3.4). Figure 5 is weird though because the 3-year drives stand out from the rest. Also, "3.5.6 Predictive Power of SMART Parameters" is interesting (and pretty sobering).

[Person of Color]

I usually leave mine on. I would power it off when I'm not using it, but the boot loop issue with my Gigabyte board is irritating. One out of every four boots it gets caught in a loop and takes 3-6 POST cycles to come alive. I'll probably just sell this CPU for another i5 down the line, one that doesn't need it's own nuclear reactor to hit 4.5GHz.

[Sangman]

I power it off when I go to bed or leave the house for more than a couple of hours. Leaving it on in those cases feels like a bit of a "waste", to me, even if that's not necessarily the case.

[MrBlackCat]

When I was a Network Engineer through the 90's and worked at a company with maybe 150 PC's of many types and ages, tracking reliability was part of the job of course. By FAR, leaving computers on all the time enabled them to last longer. Even with the advent of powering down hard disks, I saw no detectable change in drive failures across all brands we had installed.

As soon as I saw this thread, several criteria came to mind though... first was SSD's. Uh... short life compared to HDD's. I can imagine leaving anything running Windows, with an SSD, running over night or for any length of time not necessary.
Second was age. In 1993 I bought a Midwest Micro Elite notebook... fully upgraded to 8 meg of ram, BUILT IN 2400baud modem, and I opted for a color screen ($900 USD Option)... that thing was like $3200. (Cyrix 486SX @ 33MHZ I think)... anyway, while the HDD was upgraded a couple of times up to the late 90's, the computer is sitting next to me and still works... 20 years now. Impressive to me. I have a couple of boxes full of IDE HDD's below 2GB that still work. I can't say this for PC equipment bought later... after the Pentium II era I suppose. I have a dozen or more 80486 (from 33Mhz to 100Mhz with PCI Bus) class boards that still work as well as about 10 working Pentium motherboards.

Maybe they just push things harder than was done back then. Lots of factors probably. I do love the reliability of my old PC stuff though.

Relative to this thread though, with modern hardware I don't know what the best option would be, but leaving PC's on 24/7 has always proven best for the equipment I managed and my own equipment.

MrBlackCat

[Jblade]

I turn mine off, because electricity is pretty expensive around here.

[blitzer]

I leave mine on for about a week or 2 at a time. Usually I'm rendering something for work.

[Person of Color]

I leave mine on because Gigabyte's EFI sucks and loves boot loops.

"Sure, we'll give you all the overclocking features you'll ever need. But our BIOS will glitch out constantly. Sorry we can't fix it, we were too stupid to install a manual BIOS switch, so now it just cycles between the two whenever the tiniest thing happens. We always assume that's what's causing the fuck up, because bad BIOSes are so common. Aren't they?"

"Oh, what's that, you can pass 12 hours of Prime95 but our shit doesn't work? Sorry!"

[fredfuchz]

I leave it on until the power supply craps out. It did after a few years. Then i bought another one.

[Gambini]

MrBlackCat, on 13 January 2014 - 03:02 PM, said:

When I was a Network Engineer through the 90's and worked at a company with maybe 150 PC's of many types and ages, tracking reliability was part of the job of course. By FAR, leaving computers on all the time enabled them to last longer. Even with the advent of powering down hard disks, I saw no detectable change in drive failures across all brands we had installed.

As soon as I saw this thread, several criteria came to mind though... first was SSD's. Uh... short life compared to HDD's. I can imagine leaving anything running Windows, with an SSD, running over night or for any length of time not necessary.
Second was age. In 1993 I bought a Midwest Micro Elite notebook... fully upgraded to 8 meg of ram, BUILT IN 2400baud modem, and I opted for a color screen ($900 USD Option)... that thing was like $3200. (Cyrix 486SX @ 33MHZ I think)... anyway, while the HDD was upgraded a couple of times up to the late 90's, the computer is sitting next to me and still works... 20 years now. Impressive to me. I have a couple of boxes full of IDE HDD's below 2GB that still work. I can't say this for PC equipment bought later... after the Pentium II era I suppose. I have a dozen or more 80486 (from 33Mhz to 100Mhz with PCI Bus) class boards that still work as well as about 10 working Pentium motherboards.

Maybe they just push things harder than was done back then. Lots of factors probably. I do love the reliability of my old PC stuff though.

Relative to this thread though, with modern hardware I don't know what the best option would be, but leaving PC's on 24/7 has always proven best for the equipment I managed and my own equipment.

MrBlackCat

I believe manufacturers realized, with the time, that they were building unnecesarily reliable components. In the 90´s what you got this year as "THE SHIT" would be average the next year and utter crap in two more years. With this, and to remain on the edge of competitive products, they began to reduce components quality. Modern components are proved to be reliable too but there´s no extra effort on them, 2-polypropylene layers keyboards, thinner boards, metal replaced by plastic in any possible piece, etc.

EDIT: Forgot to add the point The thing is, nothing is built these days with 20 years lifetime expectations because within 5 years it will be obsolete anyway.

[MrBlackCat]

Gambini, on 16 April 2014 - 05:16 PM, said:

I believe manufacturers realized, with the time, that they were building unnecesarily reliable components. In the 90´s what you got this year as "THE SHIT" would be average the next year and utter crap in two more years. With this, and to remain on the edge of competitive products, they began to reduce components quality. Modern components are proved to be reliable too but there´s no extra effort on them, 2-polypropylene layers keyboards, thinner boards, metal replaced by plastic in any possible piece, etc.

EDIT: Forgot to add the point The thing is, nothing is built these days with 20 years lifetime expectations because within 5 years it will be obsolete anyway.

I suppose I agree... I guess the mentality of the disposable world hadn't set in yet with most manufacturers in the 90's.

MrBlackCat

[RunningWild]

Computer hardware is rated in hours of viable use, so to cut down on early deaths of hardware and to save electricity, I turn mine off

[Fievel Mousekewitz]

It's rare when I use the desktop, and I always turn it off when I am done. Once I get the Asus Sabertooth 990fx though, I'll probably use it more often. But I doubt I'll ever let it on 24/7. I use to, but don't anymore.

[The Commander]

Who are you?

[Fievel Mousekewitz]

The Angry Kiwi, on 06 October 2014 - 04:31 AM, said:

Who are you?

I am a Computer geek. Into stuffed toys, and other weird things.
I like Overclocking my systems.
And I rarely leave things on 24/7 anymore. besides, you really need to shut things down once in awhile, to clean the dust out of your system.

[The Commander]

What brings you to these forums?

[ReaperMan]

Go back to spying on people with your drones you freak.

[The Commander]

ReaperMan, on 06 October 2014 - 02:37 PM, said:

Go back to spying on people with your drones you freak.

Fuck you.
When someone joins these Duke Nukem forums and their "first" post is in a thread that has nothing to do with Duke then it is highly possible it is a bot.

My posts were to test this faggot.

Also, it is illegal by the Civil Aviation Authority plus other government legislations to "spy" on people with the drone.
Because my drone is registered and GPS tracked I would not be able to "spy on people like a freak"