Should
I leave my PC on 24/7?
There are two differing
opinions on this.
The Turn it off type feels that He or She
is saving energy and the operating life of their components.
The
leave it on type thinks that the thermal consequences of constantly
heating and cooling components across their operating range. By
leaving their machine on, the internal temperature of the parts
remains constant thereby reducing the possibility of lubrication
variances in fan bearings and spindle bearings in hard drives.
This
is the Conclusion I've come to after years of servicing the leave on
and turn off PC's…
If you use you PC daily, leave it on and
in the Power Options icon in the Control Panel set your Monitor to
turn off after 30min, (mouse movement will wake it up). In the same
Power Options icon you will find a tab called Hibernate. Click on the
Hibernation box. If it won't stay checked, your PC may not support
it. Also, some Backup Battery Power software may have their own
settings. If the check remains, click apply and OK and test it by
going to shutdown the PC. Select Hibernation which should now be one
of the choices with restart, shutdown, hibernate, etc.. If it
hibernates it will shut off. When you turn it on, it will execute the
hibernation file and you'll be at the desktop in about 20 seconds
with everything loaded. You can go to Power Options as instructed
above and set your PC to hibernate after a couple of hours if you
chose to. You must do a regular restart if you put in any Windows
updates or new programs. If your business PC sits unused over the
weekend, turn it off. In general if you are not planning on using
your PC in the next 24 hours, give it a rest. Fans and drives usually
fail after a PC has been restarted. The plain bushings used in 85% of
the PC fans are a major part of the problem. By asking for the
optional Cooler Master & Enermax Cooling fans, you will have one
less thing to concern yourself with as I have never seen one fail. I
believe hard drives have peaked as far as reliability. What I mean by
that is with prices dropping rapidly, I don't expect more then 5
years of daily usage before copying your data to a new drive. As
profit margins thin, these companies may be cutting back on quality
control. No way around that as you get what you pay for. One more
reason to install that Maxtor One Touch II backup external hard
drive.