Do you ever turn your computer off?

As I general rule, I don't shutdown/reboot unless I'm out of town, there there is an update to install or I add a new driver or program.

My old trading computer (Dell Dimension purchased in 2002) has been running pretty much around the clock for over 6 years now with no problems.

My opinion is that shutting down and restarting your computer frequently adds just as much wear and tear as keeping it running so it is up to your personal preference. It would be less productive to me to start up all my software once a day...maybe one per week or month but no more.
 
Quote from number22:

Turn on on Sunday night, and turn off on Friday afternoon.
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Similar here ... I try to turn it off at least once over each weekend. But I still do a good deal of homework, so no Fri-Mon complete shutdown for me.

I would shut down every night, but it just takes so damn long to boot up - and that's extra time each morning I'd rather spend sleeping or getting up to speed on the trading day.
 
I have five computers all over the house and I set all but one of them up to turn off/hibernate after 30 minutes if they aren't used. That probably saves me at least $500 of electricity every year. I find though that the power saver feature on Windows XP is quite unreliable. About a third of the time on any one of the computers it doesn't work. I'm not always sure why it doesn't work. I have to redo the settings again and hope that it works.

I'm sure most other people running Windows have the same problem, that the power saver feature doesn't work. If you were to add this up for all the computers in the world running Windows you would see that there is a signifigant waste of electricity which is of course contributing to global warming etc. The amount of electricity wasted for all the computers in the world running Windows would have to add up to billions of dollars.

I'm sure it's something simple that doesn't let my power saving feature work. Why doesn't Microsoft make it simple for me to diagnose the problem? If the power saver doesn't work, it should be a simple matter for anyone to see what is keeping it from working. Doesn't Microsoft have a conscience to take responsibilty for all the waste?
 
Quote from tomahawk:

Similar here ... I try to turn it off at least once over each weekend. But I still do a good deal of homework, so no Fri-Mon complete shutdown for me.

I would shut down every night, but it just takes so damn long to boot up - and that's extra time each morning I'd rather spend sleeping or getting up to speed on the trading day.
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If you want your computer to be running at 8 am couldn't you just set it to start automatically at 7:50 am? It's not that hard and you'll probably save about $100 a year in electricity:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/369729/how_to_automatically_start_your_computer/

People don't pay much mind to it but there is a lot of waste in every home. Years ago my wife was complaining about her old refrigerator. I kept telling her, it's fine, we can't always waste money just to keep up with the Jones'. Then I put a power meter on the old fridge which showed it was using about $300 a year in electricity. The new fridge in the store had a sticker on it showing that it only used $50 a year. I didn't say anything to my wife about the power meter. She was content to think that it was out of love that I got her the new fridge.

Thats why the country is in dire financial straits right now. Most people have been brainwashed by television to spend spend spend. They give very little thought to saving any money.
 
I let mine run 24/7 unless I am going out of town. I have had a fan after 1 year and a hard drive after 3 years fail but do not know if it was due to excessive running. After installing a new hard drive I now have my settings where the monitor and drives turn off after 15 minutes, standby after 1 hour and hibernate after 2 hours on the advice of a computer guru.
 
Mine is on 24/7, too much hassle opening all the programs I need every reboot.
Uptime 91 days 23 hours :D and runs like a charm.
 
Yall need to turn off your computers once in awhile to clean them out. I kept my old desktop (from 1999 era) on for a few days straight and burned my video card because of dust accumulation. That is why I always keep something up to monitor my CPU tempature.
 
I keep all my desktop computers on at all times. Why bother switching them off?

But I do reboot them once a day. A lot of stupid software has "memory leaks". Which means the software allocates dynamic memory but never quite release them properly when they are no longer in use. As time goes on, your OS has less and less memory space to use. The only way to cure it is to reset - start over... thus... reboot. Or else the computer will run more and more sluggishly as time goes by, or it reboots itself.

I run TradeStation for charting and Camtasia to record the session. A few days without rebooting... the software will crash at some point.
 
I was always in the on24/7 camp after reading something about it years ago. Anyway, I hadn't turned my PC off for months but as I was getting ready to leave for the weekend, I shut it down. Well of course we proceeded to have major rains all weekend. When I came home and tried to boot up... no dice.

When it was all said and done, moisture from the humidity condensated to the point of pooling in a number of areas including my HD and video cards. Luckily, only the HD was affected and not the cards or the mobo.

Lesson learned.
 
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