Should I leave my computer on

[nomorecatering]

Ive just bought a new compter, reasonably expensive with some good stuff on it.

Intel i7 -950 Chip

Intel DX58SO motherboard

8 Meg of 1600 mhz DDR3 ram

Ati HD5850 graphics card 1GB

Should i leave the unit on 24/7 as i have always read that thermal expansion cycles are the killer of electronics or just shut it down once per day when i retire to bed.

[Loose rivets]

Flash *****!! You could turn it off and leave it off - until the rest of us have got a nice bit of kit like that.

[nomorecatering]

Was half the cost of the laptop I baught 5 years ago and is 100 x as powerful.

[green granite]

I switch everything off at the mains plug every night, very rarely have any issues with software or hardware.

[Mike-Bracknell]

I'd be surprised if you can do anything with 8meg of ram anyway.

Anyway, turn it off at night. It'll cost you circa 60 quid annually (and rising) to keep a PC on 24x7, and that'll buy you a new PSU.

Thermal expansion is a complete red herring in this case. That spanking new kit will be obsolete years before it's MTBF from thermal expansion.

[Bern Oulli]

I've got some old but serviceable 2 meg RAM chips which you can have an upgrade for a reasonable fee. Cost me £30 each about 30 years ago.

[IO540]

If you want longest life, no doubt 24/7 is the best way to get it. Thermal cycling remains the #1 killer of electronics, especially with the heat in a typical fast PC.

But you pay for that in electricity - say £100+ per year per PC.

BTW the latest 3GHz Intel processors draw much less power than a few years ago (judging from the chip temperature), and I have just built a PC with a 128GB SSD (Corsair I think) which cost about £350 and this dramatically improves overall performance; it is like a 10GHz CPU.

[aerobelly]

"Thermal expansion is a complete red herring in this case. That spanking new kit will be obsolete years before it's MTBF from thermal expansion."

Hmmmm, I have known thermal expansion push memory chips out of their sockets in a day. Every day. They had to be patted down by hand before trying to restart the machine (a Prime 400 for the techno-archeologists). Technology has improved since 1975 though.

If the machine is on every day for most of the day I leave it on, there are some house-keeping tasks set to run between 4 and 6am. File indexing, DB backups and so on.


'b

[mad_jock]

Personally


If you are running linux/unix leave it on.

If you are using Microsoft turn it off as the reboot will do it some good if nothing else.

My linux box sits chugging away doing physics "stuff" for boffins while its still on.

[tailstrikecharles]

turn it off, unless you are using it actively as a server. Leave it on overnight on Sundays for example, and schedule the Windows/OS updates to occur during that time.

Much of the 'thermal expansion bull!!!!' and 'heat cycling' is outdated conventional wisdom.

[Mike-Bracknell]

FWIW, memory chips these days have clips to hold them in. They're also going to expand in shear rather than "come out of their sockets".

[Keef]

Problem with a PC like that is the heat it's going to produce. Leave it on all the time and the room might get uncomfortably hot.

[Booglebox]

There isn't really any reason to leave it on overnight. Thermal expansion isn't really a problem these days, and if you leave it on 24/7 you'll be wearing out fans and hard disk bearings.

However leaving it on one night a week and setting defrag, virus scan, backup etc. to run during this time is a very good idea.