I have my six-month-old laptop on fairly often - sometimes for days at a time. I guess I relate to the machine in a pretty human way and I start thinking it needs some rest after a while. Is that just silly?
My brother keeps his desktop on pretty much all the time and nothing goes wrong. Are there any opinions on this? Does anyone else just leave theirs on for days at a time, too?
Quite a lot of computer problems can be fixed by just restarting your computer - or shutting it down for a while and coming back to it later. Something to do with fragmented RAM or something.
If the computer is on-line as well as being on all the time, it does increase your risk of being hacked, and it gives any viruses that may be lurking plenty of opportunity to spread themselves.
Having the computer on all the time is a waste of electricity. I believe the biggest electricity consumers in a computer are the monitor (if it is a cathode ray tube one), the cooling fan and the CPU in that order.
One good reason for leaving the computer switched on when you’re not using it - so that you can defragment the hard disk(s) or scan for viruses while you are off doing something else.
I’ve almost always left any desktop I’ve had on all the time, but I don’t think I’d do it with a laptop (though I’ve never had my own.)
Reason: Laptops (I think) generally run hotter and cost more to get fixed if/when something goes (a lot more.) Plus I’ve heard horror stories that have something to do with leaving them plugged in all the time and batteries getting ruined. Batteries are also expensive.
Mine requires a reboot about once a week. I’m pretty sure it’s a RAM problem.
You can always hit internet lock on your firewall program.
You can set the display to auto off. Laptops can also be set to go to sleep mode. But, as MK says, if it screws with your batteries then turn them off or leave the batteries out while you’re in powered up mode (after they charge)
[quote=“Juba”]One good reason for leaving the computer switched on when you’re not using it - so that you can defragment the hard disk(s) or scan for viruses while you are off doing something else.[/quote].
Yes, mine is set to download virus updates and scan each night. It defrags once a week.
I don’t turn it off. There is another thread here somewhere that dealt with this issue. Also, having a Taiwanese SO causes grief. They turn everything off all the time. Drove me nuts having to reboot each day and sometimes I’d lose work. :fume:
I leave my desktop on all the time, I download stuff so I leave them on while its downloading, when I go to sleep I just shut off the monitor… however I dont know about laptops they do run a bit hot and I think leaving them plugged in is hard on the batteries…
If you leave the computer on for days or weeks without rebooting, lots of problems can crop up due to memory leaks from badly written (and even some well-written) software. Rebooting solves these problems and boosts performance by clearing the garbage out of memory. I’ve heard of office policies for daily “therapeutic reboots”.