[locke91114]

What happens if you leave your computer on for to long? Mine has been on for about 5 days now. Its working just fine, just as it always does when i leave it on for a few days or even a week.

Is leaving the computer on for to long bad for it in anyway? How long would be to long?

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Hi. There's a lot of personal opinions out there. I always thought that it would wear down your computer parts and such, but that doesn't seem to be the case, according to classes I've taken. You see, when you turn off the computer, the fans stop spinning, and dust enters the system case. It's not a horrible thing, but if you look inside some systems, you'll find a lot of dust. There are only three bad things I can find with leaving your computer on all the time. (1) It's going to run-up your electricity bill. If you don't see a huge difference on the bill, and it doesn't bother you, don't worry about it. (2) It could eventually fry your monitor. Good news is that this can be prevented with screen savers and using the monitor power settings to turn off after X amount of idle time.

Now, most people, including businesses, leave their computers on for weeks at a time. The occasional restart is good for the system, so don't stop doing that. If you want to do this, go right ahead, I don't think it's going to have a profound affect on anything

[Facedown98]

Hi. There's a lot of personal opinions out there. I always thought that it would wear down your computer parts and such, but that doesn't seem to be the case, according to classes I've taken. You see, when you turn off the computer, the fans stop spinning, and dust enters the system case. It's not a horrible thing, but if you look inside some systems, you'll find a lot of dust. There are only three bad things I can find with leaving your computer on all the time. (1) It's going to run-up your electricity bill. If you don't see a huge difference on the bill, and it doesn't bother you, don't worry about it. (2) It could eventually fry your monitor. Good news is that this can be prevented with screen savers and using the monitor power settings to turn off after X amount of idle time.

Now, most people, including businesses, leave their computers on for weeks at a time. The occasional restart is good for the system, so don't stop doing that. If you want to do this, go right ahead, I don't think it's going to have a profound affect on anything

[Tyger]

The only really important part here is the hard drive, you are causing wear on the hard drive bearings, but if you aren't doing anything, running any processes that write to or read from the drive, you aren't wearing the seek mechanism. Now the real reason the hard drive is important is it contains all your data. And the newer larger hard drives are just not as realiable as the old ones, they are simply built to much closer tolerances and small changes affect them more, like too much heat. That's why I prefer drives less than 80gb for the master. BTW it's very easy to clone a drive and just put it in a drawer as back up, and fairly cheap too.

The other aspects to consider, if you live in an area with frequent storms or power failures keeping the machine not only off but unplugged will give you protection from damage and power surges. If you have a box with a 500w supply and hungry hardware the power savings may be considerable, a barebones box with 145 watts different. You can in most cases turn the monitor off completely, it often uses more poweer than the machine.

[locke91114]

great! I was scared leaving it on might make my proccesor blow up or something! I have an tiny 10gb hdd as the master hdd, wich i can replace easily, so i guess itll be ok according to what you said tyger. And suprisingly theres not much of a difference in my electricity bill (maybe because i always shut th monitor off)

thankyou!