PC always on

Somebody has told me that it is pretty safe to keep a PC on all the time, in fact he said that keeping it on is better than switching it on and off every day. Is that really so?

 

I never shut my system off. I have a dimension 8100 purchased in '01 and it's been off a total of maybe 8 hours. Apart from adding to your electric bill I would just leave it on. Might want to turn your monitor off if you are using CRT.

Edit - I have heard that it is more taxing on a CPU during the initial start up but I can't say if that is true or not.

 

yeah, that's what he said, harddrive's life is reduced every time the pc is switched off and on.

 

Its definitely safe.

Whether its a good idea would depend on your usage pattern, e.g. how often you would turn it on and off if you didnt leave it on all the time.

I would recommend if you do leave it on all the time that you make sure the hard drive is being spun down and the monitor goes into power saver mode (standby mode in Windows is even better).

Having the whole thing on an UPS is a good idea too so it wont suffer from hard resets during minor power fluctuations. Most UPSs come with a cable so that the PC will be automatically shutdown properly before the UPS runs out of power in case you're not around during a non-trivial power outage.

I leave several computers on 24 x 7 at home.

 

Except for the intermittent power outage during hurricane season, my trading computer never gets turned off. Although that seems rather wasteful from an energy consumption standoint, it is my understanding that powering up every day is "stressful" on the hard drive.

 

how do would you have the drive "spun down" and what does that mean?

And what about simply switching off monitors manually instead of saver mode?

 

If you're running XP, check out the "Power Options" control applet. Basically the computer tells the hard drive to stop spinning if it hasnt been used in X minutes (you define X). If you start to use the computer the hard drive is spun up again automatically.

Yep, that works too - as long as you dont forget.

 

are you referring to hibernation mode?

 

No. Hibernation mode saves the current state to disk and actually completely shuts off the PC. When you turn it back on the state is automatically reloaded but from a power/stress point of view that is no different that just powering it down.

If your system doesnt have standby as an option then the hardware may not support it.

 

Yeah I have standby function, I basically need my trading platform on 24/7, will it actually go into standby therefore?