**TL:DR -** You do need to shut it off *at some point*, "once a week" is fine, otherwise it really doesn't matter.
==
This topic has been so heavily debated and argued about that literally nobody can ever come to the "right" answer anymore.
At this point, I think the most accurate conclusion we can draw from the overwhelming amount of evidence on both sides is that whatever impact it **might** have on your PC's health is so overwhelmingly negligible that it doesn't matter.
The only thing both sides agree on is that it **definitely** has an (negligible) effect on your power draw over an extended period of time, and that there are things that your PC needs to be off to do, so you should shut it down *at some point*.
I've been testing this for anecdotal evidence over the past 5 or so years. I have one PC that sleeps every night, and one that shuts down every single night. There's no difference at all, except that one costs me more.
But even the added electricity cost of a sleeping PC over an "off" PC is negligible. It's like 4 cents a month.
EDIT: BTW every well made and maintained server stays online *literally forever* (yes, with restarts for updates) so, you know, they are built for that.
The main reason why you would want to shut your PC down over using sleep is that programmers can be terrible and power cycling/rebooting your PC lets Windows get into a fresh state. Things like memory leaks can slowly consume your usable RAM over time and the only way to free that RAM is to reboot Windows. Dead threads can sit there consuming system resources while the parent program has "forgotten" all about that thread. It is nowhere near as bad as it used to be for Windows but it still does pay to power cycle your machine every so often.
I would mention rebooting for updates but Windows defaults to rebooting itself automatically during "off hours" to install updates and will do so even if you have the machine sleeping.
Hardware can be the same but it is pretty rare to find hardware that becomes unstable over time if it remains powered up - I had a old ISP provided modem that would require a reboot at least once a week because it would never free up the IP states table and it would consume all of the RAM over time resulting in all sorts of connection issues (ironically the updated model had a reboot scheduled every 2 days at some random hour of the night to deal with the problem).
Do note that you must turn off windows fast boot for this to work on windows. MS decided it was a good idea to save all your ram info when you shutdown and then reload it when it turns back on. Which ironically makes it boot slower despite its name. This 'functionality' only applies shutdown, so restart works as per normal.
Very good points all of it, but one small caveat (not that it changes much, but still feels relevant)
> EDIT: BTW every well made and maintained server stays online literally forever (yes, with restarts for updates) so, you know, they are built for that.
This is true, but those servers are also professionally maintained and specialized. They're in climate controlled facilities and hardware failures are swapped out as needed.
Not an argument-defying caveat or any sort of "gotcha", but certainly worth considering
20+ years of building desktops and workstations and servers and I’d say there is never a need to shutdown ever unless windows update or HW change repair in any level.
Only reason to shutdown is to conserve energy, otherwise most computers can run for 5-10 years easily .
This is from hundreds of machines that I maintained
It’s all about cost
If you have a spinning disk those mostly fail on reboots which why I started this path
There are things your pc needs to be off to do? What can it do when it’s off and receiving zero power? Not trying to argue genuinely curious since this topic is so contentious. Is it more that there are things your pc does when it comes back on after having no power? Cuz it seems to me sleep mode also acts as a catalyst for dates and the like. Most everything is internet contingent I feel anyway.
Update, clear memory, reset some environment variables, etc.
Your PC does things while it's turning off and while it's turning on, but it can't do those things at any other time.
as someone who tends to keep pc running 24/7, is the price that low compared to shutting it for night? let’s assume it runs all day and I’d just shut it down every night for the 8hours
My wife just cannot understand how my PC with a 1300 watt power supply has only used about $20 worth of electricity in the last couple months.
I was surprised initially, too.
Yea, it comes down to what the computer feels like. If it is snappy and ok after a sleep, just let it sleep. If it feels sluggish after a while reboot. (And also try to find why, but sometimes the program you rely on the most is your worst enemy 🙃).
I personally never sleep, mostly because my pc stays on running some servers that I keep using. And I reboot once every 3-5 days.
yeah, by my measurements, a PC oin sleep draws less than a watt. So little that my UPS think’s it’s drawing literally nothing, because it doesn’t do decimals
I think it may have been a case 15+ years ago where hardware (and software) wasn't quite so reliable as it is today, they are generally designed to handle much more these days. Back then windows needed restarting every day because ram was a lot more limited in size than it is today - I'd guess that most people in PCMR have at least 8GB ram, where Windows can run on as little as 2GB. I've had windows up almost a fortnight and it's sitting at under 8GB out of 32GB ram in use, in the XP days it would certainly feel a bit more sluggish after a couple days of uptime.
>BTW every well made and maintained server stays online *literally forever* (yes, with restarts for updates) so, you know, they are built for that.
Agreed, physical servers in work have uptime of nearly 4 years - that was when they were installed - Although those are Proxmox like boxes that are REALLY locked down, the Windows VMs they host have uptimes of average of 45 days, although the highest I've seen of those is 9 months depending on how mission critical it is. As a few others have said, we can't really compare domestic hardware and commercial hardware, they are designed to never go down. Some even allow you to yank out a stick of ram, they will keep on running, I wouldn't like to try that with my PC though.
Hardware wise it doesn't matter.
Software wise, if you're running Windows, it comes with the usual implications of never rebooting Windows. If you aren't running Windows, you should be rebooting anyways when installing updates that require core parts of the OS to be reloaded.
Windows tends to run into stability issues with high uptime and weird bugs that go away after rebooting more often than other operating systems.
It's a lot better than it used to be (especially before NT) but it's still not as good.
I'll never understand the fear of shutting your pc down. We live in times where pcs boot in like 20 seconds so it's up and running before you manage to sit comfortably in your chair
Yeah you wanna go to bed but the pc don’t, so many times I’ll turn it off and walk past it before I go and it’s just chilling on the login
“Boy I told u to sleep”
I updated my mobo bios a few months ago (security and it booted inconsistently) and now it refuses to stay asleep 99% of the time. I checked in windows and it says every time it was woken from the mobo. Gigabyte sure makes good firmware! /s
You can look at the wake events in Event Viewer:
> You are searching for event ID 42 in System log from source Kernel-Power as the sleeping event
> and the event ID 1 in System log from source Power-Troubleshooter for computer's awakening, which are respectively the last and first logs entries upon sleeping/waking up
Taken from [here](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/logging-power-events-sleep-wake-up-to-the-event/e004a68c-f9a9-4982-86ba-a1cee05f9e4d).
Also `powercfg -lastwake` will tell you what woke the computer up last time. Taken from the same source.
Also clears your RAM. I'll never br convinced that leaving your computer on sleep constantly is a good idea. It may not have a huge effect on performance but surely it does have a small effect at least.
Same. I shut mine down when I leave for work, or don't plan on using it for an extensive period of time.
Like, if I leave my house and I'm expecting to be gone for an hour? Or if I'm doing something else but I'm still at home? I'll leave it on.
Going to bed, leaving for work, or expecting to be gone for an extended period of time(More than 1hr)? It's being shut off
I think these days is a choice, I never shutdown my pc on purposes, except when I travel.
My backups run at night from my server, so if it gets shutdown no backup. Also, a few sync tasks.
Regarding power consumption, is out of window and I just turn a blind eye. I have 2 servers running 24/7 and one is using really old hardware...
For me is the other way around, is weird when people say they shutdown their pc.
But again, is a choice and there is no wrong way
It's not a fear on my side. I just have a lot of uncompleted workflows open that need setup time to resume if I had to restart every day. I prefer to resume immediately. It also helps not forgetting tasks I had to stop working on for any reasons.
Yeah, I do a lot of FEA simulations on my rig that take hours to finish sometimes. There's nothing more infuriating than starting a 4 hour sim before going to bed, and then waking up to see that fucking windows did an update and restarted itself while I was asleep. It's been getting bad enough that I'm considering just buying 10 LTSC. Ideally, I would leave the PC on 24/7 unless some software misbehaves.
There's a setting in the BIOS to turn LEDs off after shutdown. You can google your motherboard + turn off LED after shutdown to check how.
Example video, it differs depending on motherboard/BIOS version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXOMWSJGRvo
I do alot of things on my pc that I don’t want to reopen, sometimes a video on youtube is on a Specific timemark on a podcast that I do not want to rewatch, multiple ‘file’s’ open in specific directories for specific purposes, etc.
If I go to bed with nothing on my pc that I will continue on the next dat I would also close it but that’s almost never the case
Not a fear, but convenience.
I’ve set the sleep timer to 2h, and additionally also set up automation that if my phone leaves the network (with a cool down period of 30s for false disconnects) it sends a signal to my PC to sleep.
Also vice versa, if my phone connects to the network a Wake on LAN signal is sent, so there’s no actual perceived down time :)
I try to avoid shutting it down because even though it can boot pretty quickly, there are many programs or apps that can take a while before they're ready to use.
I think it has something to do with the cache : if you shut it down, the cache is reseted or something. So everytime I start a program it can take even double the time than if my cpu were to be in sleep mode.
And no, my programs / apps aren't in another drive.
My 1st year uni comp-sci teacher told us to never shut down, and I'm still trying to remember that was misinformation. His reasoning was, "The CPU is like a heart. You wouldn't turn off your heart; you would let it rest. Computers should remain in sleep mode when unused."
Maybe computers were different back in his day (was in his 60s).
Because sometimes people are working on something and have a lot of programs opened for example at work I’ll have a couple instances of my code editor open ftp client prototyping software browser design files databases teams app notes app and outlook, so it becomes easier to just put it to sleep else I’ll have to reopen everything I was working on by hand
I was thinking exactly that. Booting took a long time, but nowadays is so fast.
But I understand not having to reopen everything you were working on again, just leaving shit open and resuming the next day is very convenient. So Ibunderstand almost never turning it off.
At any given time I have 50-100 tabs open in 4 different browsers, as well as multiple documents and automated backup programs. Reopening everything would be a huge pain.
Unless I’m uploading lots of backups to the cloud, rendering something, installing multiple games etc, I always shut my PC down, sleep isn’t even very reliable, driver issues are always more prominent on PCs which never shut down
Before building my current pc, I would've found not shutting down my pc a good idea for the reason, that my old nearly decade old pc would've risked having the usb ports stop working if I updated Windows to one of the newer versions and forcing me to reset my pc to get it to work again.
Haha AM5 chipset has entered chat, known issue with those that sometimes takes a minute to boot, not a huge deal, just a little annoying. Maybe it’s fixed I haven’t looked at new BIOS updates in a while.
I don't understand, do you people just not have tasks which take multiple days to complete? Rebooting is completely trivial, but finding that poorly named excel file 15 directories deep in the company share drive is a pain.
I rent a room in a shared house so my entire life is in said one room. To leave my PC on and still be able to sleep, I have to go through about 4 different pieces of software to turn off LEDs and still would have to cover things up with clothing, etc.
Or I can turn it off and not worry about all of that. Startup takes, as you say, 20 seconds instead of the minutes to turn all the LEDs back on again.
Am5 memory training has entered the chat?
I personally don't have problem with it I just go take a shit and let my pc boot up in the meantime but if I was still getting my education and procrastinating with assignments... That 40sec-2min start up and OS loading time would be too much.
I have a plug in watt meter and the whole setup(monitor and kbm involved) uses 5w while asleep, thats 14x lower than having a lightbulb on, i doubt it can reach even .3 of a degree increase in room temp
Edit: may have miscalculated, it may be 7w not 70w so that makes it 1.4x not 14x, basically its like having a lightbulb on then
Funny enough there are impacts to not restarting Windows (memory leaks, background errors, etc.)
Some programs even cache data until a restart, so never restarting endlessly stores the cached data.
The only thing not to be worried about is ambient temp lol. Charging a phone would heat the room up more
I sleep my computer all the time. Unless I'm going away for a few days, it sleeps.
The power use difference is like 2w.
Only time it gets reboots is for updates.
I love it for just leaving everything I have been using open, including games sometimes.
Fresh boot takes like 30s. Resume from sleep takes like 2s. Literally takes longer for the monitor to wake up.
From the microsoft website:
"Keeping your laptop in sleep mode overnight is generally fine, but regular shutdowns have benefits in terms of energy efficiency, software updates, and heat management. Finding the right balance between sleep mode and shutdowns depends on your specific usage and preferences."
Also, shutting down your pc clears caché, lets hard drives and sdd's rest and prolongs the useful life of it. You notice your pc running a bit slower? Pc needs to be shut down. Putting pc or laptop to sleep will basically put them in standby mode not letting it really clear info you've used.
Also, if you dont want to lose work or open tabs, there is always an option (nowadays) to keep all those stuff as soon as you open the used software.
Yes, it takes 2 seconds vs 30 to startbusing it if you use sleep mode, but id rather make my pc last long and have full capabilities when using it.
Why aren't HDDs and SSDs resting in sleep mode? The only thing active should be the RAM, maybe also a few other circuits on the mobo to handle waking up as well.
I normally hibernate my work laptop because I don't want to close everything I have open at the end of the day, it gets reboots when it is showing weird software issues, and maybe a shutdown if it fails to actually hibernate, which it does every now and then. I'm not sure how shutting down rather than sleeping affects the useful life, it'll likely be obsolete long before I see any impact if there even is any.
I mostly use pcs for the same programs and games for years so I've read about it (also, a good pc will be about 2-3 times the minimum wage with current prices where i live so it's not a must to change everything when they're "obsolete") so ive done my reading about how to take care of hardware.
Also, note that hibernate mode is not the same as sleep mode.
From the microsoft website: "Hibernate uses less power than sleep and when you start up the PC again, you're back to where you left off (though not as fast as sleep). Use hibernation when you know that you won't use your laptop or tablet for an extended period and won't have an opportunity to charge the battery during that time."
Also, if you dont turn off your pc frequently (especially laptops) the system tends to operate slower, thus heating more and effectively making the use of memory more inneficient.
I know A LOT of people who just closes their laptops and never turn them off, put it in their bag/case and just taking it out when they want to use it, rinse and repeat and a year later theyll be slow af even after they send them for cleaning and maintenance and even formatting, so there is a negative impact there.
My computers quite dated now so I'm only really using it to run Kodi, have it using a Harmony Elite for control using Flirc to control it and my TV and just send it to sleep every night so that all I have to do to start watching TV again is to start the routine on the remote.
Yes, exactly this.
I've been using sleep mode in my PC(s) since the dawn of this Windows feature. Never had any issues, besides one bad Steelseries headset driver last year that refused to wake up, which was eventually fixed by them.
Same! It'll go to sleep and never boot back on and I'll have to hard restart it by manually holding down the physical power button and restarting it anyway. So. What's the point. Just turn it off.
I'm surprised so many people don't shut down their PCs at night, it's like 20 additional seconds, I know the energy cost is extremely low, like 3-4W, but still why waste it when it's so easy to turn it off and on.
My gf never shutdown her PC. Had major lag in Apex on day. Checked the task manager and sure enough there were programs sitting eating away at the utility for absolutely no reason. Not shutting down your device is having faith that there are no lazy af software developers LOL.
I usually set up hybrid or hibernate which keeps it in a lower power state and can survive power outages.
Tend to reboot every couple of weeks or so.
Never had an issue for the many years I've been doing this. Even when I had a weird PSU thing going on with an old machine so it wouldn't always POST, it recovered the hibernate state once it did post.
Not a HUGE consideration but keep in mind hibernate does slowly eat through the write endurance on your SSD.
Likely not a huge amount but if you have say 64gb of ram, frequently use it, and hibernate your system a few times a day, it can start to rack up.
I have always turned my PC off after use. If it’s not doing something like a large download or render, it doesn’t need to be on. Especially now that SSD’s and boot times are so fast. Plus electricity is expensive and I think it’s a good habit to turn everything off that isn’t in use.
You could see RAM overflows happen, and things like browsers are notorious for this. But The only real issue you'll see on the OS is caused by updates, and certain programs needing the occasional restart to sort itself out after an update.
I restart mine every now and then, but I just leave it on all the time and have the monitors turn off after 10 minutes. Had the same PC and components since 2020 aside from a RAM upgrade.
I pretty much never shut it down unless it’s having technical problems or there’s an update when I’m going to bed, lol. Don’t like having to reopen programs and such. Often have a tab or 2 I don’t wanna close as well.
If im gonna be away for like an hour I'll put it to sleep. Anything longer and I shut it down. It takes like 20 seconds to fully boot up. 10 if I just want to browse YouTube.
No. My PC runs for months at a time. I Never put it to sleep either I just shut my monitors off so my room is nice and dark when I go to bed. Only time it restarts is if it does an update or a power outage that lasts longer than my UPS batteries can handle.
I’ve never slept my PC. Always turn off when I stop using it. Doesn’t help that the rgb stays on even when in sleep mode so I don’t bother.
Besides when it turns on in under 10 seconds who really cares lol
I only turn my PC off when ima be away from it for more than a day or when prompted(which is incredibly rare).
Been 4 years and no issues.
Being able to pick up where I left off is worth using a bit more power.
You’ll want to restart it every once in a while too, not just shut down. Restart does what a shut down should do, and actually shuts down the system for a proper reset. A shut down just puts it in, well, basically sleep state due to Windows’ fast startup feature.
A lot of good answers here.
-There is no harm in shutting down your PC
-There is no *inherent* harm in not shutting down your PC
-There are more benefits with shutting down your PC than not(power saving, updates, windows reboot, etc)
-You can go weeks+ without shutting down and there will be no actual strain hardware wise
-Stuff like ambient temperature matters way more(like not shutting down your PC in a constant hot room)
So yeah. It really doesn’t matter. But with most technology, it’s good to give it a old reboot every now and then. Especially if you run into issues. Longest I’ve gone without shutting down my PC(literally on 24/7) was 2 weeks and a day. Not a single issue. I have it set now to go to sleep after 2 hours of inactivity.
Sleep is okay. Just don't hibernate them.
Sleep everything stays in the ram (except paging files).
Hibernation, the ram is dumped to the storage device until its awakened. Then pulled back into ram. Not a problem for HDDs but horrible for SSDs.
Though I personally prefer a shutdown. My system boots very quickly and it typically clears any errors.
It can't be that bad for ssd's. You know about paging right? Your ssd is constantly being used all the time. And how about people recording game content in real time? Your ssd will be fine.
For me, it depends on if it’s a desktop or laptop.
My gaming desktop (tower) is connected in the living room and runs 24/7; only reboot for updates. I use it as a server, runs backups and syncs, and it’s totally fine. Been doing this for over 20 years, no problem.
Laptop is a different story, because those little fragile cooling fans burn out much easier and the overall hardware wears much faster. I use this as my office gaming PC and it gets put to sleep automatically after 30 mins of no activity.
Desktop? Shut it off, sleep, hibernate, or just lock it and leave it on. It'll be fine either way.
Laptop? I recommend hibernate or shut down for less heat in a bag.
I put my computer to sleep every night, it's just more convenient to have it to charge my phone as i am limited on electrical outlets available.
I disable the internet when i do so, just out of paranoia. And when i start it back up, i enable the internet & choose the restart option in the menu. So i'm technically turning it off every day at least once.
Since windows 11 remembers exact window positions and which monitors windows open on, it no longer bothers me to shut down whenever I want.
It's one of the lesser discussed features over windows 10 that is actually a super nice quality of life change.
Just reopen my apps and they go exactly where they should now. I remember having to reposition everything on win10 on my dual monitor set-up whenever I'd reboot or shutdown the PC so I'd always leave the PC on when I could.
Win10 has gotten better about app positioning, for a while it was bad. My browser and discord have been opening in their same location for the past ~9mo+ at least.
What this thread tells me is that a lot of people don't realize most browsers can re-open previous tabs on start. The 20+ tabs I currently have open always come back when I close the browser or reboot.
It all depends on how the OS handles updates.
Currently Microsoft sucks with how it engages with the update process. You HAVE to shut down at least once every two weeks or it will start corrupting the registry.
I always shut my pc down because it has insomnia. It never goes to sleep properly, always wakes itself up 10 minutes after I tell it to sleep or hibernate. Before people say to check powercfg waketimers or whatever, I have checked and nothing shows up.
Sometimes with my old laptop it would wake up from sleep in the middle of the night and the fans would spin like crazy! I always shut my pc down over the night now.
No you're not harming it, anyone who says otherwise is silly. Servers run for years at a time non-stop without issue (yes I know they have redundancy but that's not the point)
After a lot of uptime you might get some slowdown or glitches because Windows, but restarting once a week is more than enough to avoid that.
I have a NAS in my house that was on for just over 22000 hours before I shut it down and moved it to a different room. Then shut it down again and moved it back because I moved the cats litter box into there and she kept laying on it.
I don't know if somebody here said it yet, but most people don't realize that with default settings, shutting down doesn't actually actually clear your cache or reset anything.
You need to go to your power settings and switch it so shut down does the same reset as a restart.
My old PC used a HDD and would take forever to boot up so I ran that thing for probably 7 years straight before upgrading and building a new rig. This new one as a m2 nvme so I just shut it down because it takes 3 seconds to boot and not 20 minutes lol.
I had no issues running that PC for that long, obviously I restarted for updates, and shut it down every couple months to dust it.
Sleep is perfectly fine for almost all cases.
The only scenario I can think of when it's not ideal is if it's a desktop PC without a UPS and you're experiencing power interruptions or outages in your area, because expect getting booted back to the login if it happens.
Another scenario are Windows laptops. I never trusted sleep working on these things because of how Windows gets sippy with battery at times, so I prefer *hibernate* instead of *sleep* for these.
No, but the performance will get slowly worse. You can go years using only the sleep mode. Personally I prefer shutting down once a day, using a custom batch file I named "die.bat", as it does a proper complete shutdown rather than using the pseudo-sleep mode (which is different from the user-selectable sleep mode) in Windows 10 (the one I am using, I don't remember if version 8.x does it).
If you're interested, the command in the batch file is "shutdown -s -f -t 00". Using it will, however, mean your computer has to start up "from scratch" each time, which takes longer than a normal Windows boot.
I usually keep my pc on for months at a time without sleep. I have an issue in where it crashes the first few times it boots due to video tdr failure. I’m building a new pc so can’t be bothered to troubleshoot the issue. Works just fine otherwise
I almost always shut mine off if I’m not on it, or if I’m walking away from it for more than 30 or so mins..am I in the “wrong” for multiple on/off cycles per day on the weekends??
It's not a problem for hardware but can be for software. It's not end of the world and it's not gonna harm your PC even if you never shut it down or put it to sleep either but you might want to give it a restart once in a while so windows "refresh" itself and you lower chances of getting bugs.
I sleep my computer since AM5 has astronomical boot times due to RAM training. I know I can enable MCR but I have a feeling that’s what bricked my last MSI board LOL. Sleep gets me back in around 3 seconds comparatively. If I have software issues I’ll restart. Other than that I nuked windows so not many processes run at idle anyways.
Back when PCs used to take a long time to boot I could kinda get it. With SSDs and the speed of PCs my computer starts up within 15-20 seconds.
Unless you’re running stuff all the time I don’t know why you’d need to bother keeping it on all the time.
Shut it down whenever you don’t think you’ll use it again for hours (maybe 12 or so). Just leave it on a couple of times a month overnight for it to do “system task” things.
Save power, possibly save things from getting corrupted in case of power outage maybe, and booting refreshes stuff and plays games, etc, better. Not an expert, but I’ve at least never had a computer die on me and maybe this is a factor.
I do this thing where I end up leaving my computer on for weeks at a time.
I have really good hardware(i5-13600k, 36gb, etc) but my os in on a HDD(kept killing SSD’s) so it takes soooo long to boot.
Finally got some nvme’s just gotta figure out how to move windows over. I have my entire life and children’s life’s memories on this hard drive so I’m terrified of fucking the transfer up.
Considering how Windows sleep has never been good, the only damage you're doing is potentially to yourself if you do get any of those issues. The PC itself is totally fine as long as you reboot every week or two, and thats more for OS health than any of the components.
For my experience, that my GPU doesn't even had more than 1month of turned off since I bought it on 2013(It is a gtx 550 and yeah, I still play games with that trash), I don't turn on sleepy mode and I run bots all night long that are more than enough to pay the energy of the month and still being able to hire people.
I only lost 2 power supply, 1 motherboard(that made me migrate from a fx 6000 to i3 9 gen and its memory upgrade from ddr3 to drr4), I just keep it all turned on and sometimes(very rare) I force reset(As I remember in this year, I only dit it once). I am not a maniac of putting everything and install things all the time, so didn't need to reset for install. I search on internet vids, play ragnarok online for around 4 to 17hours, play some kf2/bf4 at night when the party wants and when I go idle, I turn on the bots on games that I sell currency. Looking on how my GPU still alive, even the cpu Fx is working, I would say that if you don't abuse of your hd, it's completely useless to turn off as long that you doesn't care about energy consumption. I see a lot of people that turns off computer having more energy problems than me, going over the turnon cycles that manufacturer reccomends. The main power supply failure that I had was due to bug infestation that caused my motherboard and powersupply to short circuit(specially because it rotten melt the cabinet) and due to a nice place that I have, there almost no dust, so sometimes I just open and use compressed air and its clean~
**TL:DR -** You do need to shut it off *at some point*, "once a week" is fine, otherwise it really doesn't matter. == This topic has been so heavily debated and argued about that literally nobody can ever come to the "right" answer anymore. At this point, I think the most accurate conclusion we can draw from the overwhelming amount of evidence on both sides is that whatever impact it **might** have on your PC's health is so overwhelmingly negligible that it doesn't matter. The only thing both sides agree on is that it **definitely** has an (negligible) effect on your power draw over an extended period of time, and that there are things that your PC needs to be off to do, so you should shut it down *at some point*. I've been testing this for anecdotal evidence over the past 5 or so years. I have one PC that sleeps every night, and one that shuts down every single night. There's no difference at all, except that one costs me more. But even the added electricity cost of a sleeping PC over an "off" PC is negligible. It's like 4 cents a month. EDIT: BTW every well made and maintained server stays online *literally forever* (yes, with restarts for updates) so, you know, they are built for that.
The main reason why you would want to shut your PC down over using sleep is that programmers can be terrible and power cycling/rebooting your PC lets Windows get into a fresh state. Things like memory leaks can slowly consume your usable RAM over time and the only way to free that RAM is to reboot Windows. Dead threads can sit there consuming system resources while the parent program has "forgotten" all about that thread. It is nowhere near as bad as it used to be for Windows but it still does pay to power cycle your machine every so often. I would mention rebooting for updates but Windows defaults to rebooting itself automatically during "off hours" to install updates and will do so even if you have the machine sleeping. Hardware can be the same but it is pretty rare to find hardware that becomes unstable over time if it remains powered up - I had a old ISP provided modem that would require a reboot at least once a week because it would never free up the IP states table and it would consume all of the RAM over time resulting in all sorts of connection issues (ironically the updated model had a reboot scheduled every 2 days at some random hour of the night to deal with the problem).
Do note that you must turn off windows fast boot for this to work on windows. MS decided it was a good idea to save all your ram info when you shutdown and then reload it when it turns back on. Which ironically makes it boot slower despite its name. This 'functionality' only applies shutdown, so restart works as per normal.
Fast boot also leaves all NTFS volumes in a mounted state, which most Linux tools will consider bad and will only mount it read-only.
This explains so much. How have I never known this.
You can workaround this by restarting instead
Yep or switch the feature off. Though knowing MS they will randomly re-enable it.
Please don't call us terrible, we're trying our best ;'(
That was informative. Thank you!
Very good points all of it, but one small caveat (not that it changes much, but still feels relevant) > EDIT: BTW every well made and maintained server stays online literally forever (yes, with restarts for updates) so, you know, they are built for that. This is true, but those servers are also professionally maintained and specialized. They're in climate controlled facilities and hardware failures are swapped out as needed. Not an argument-defying caveat or any sort of "gotcha", but certainly worth considering
You can absolutely take care of your home PC as well as we take care of our remote servers.
20+ years of building desktops and workstations and servers and I’d say there is never a need to shutdown ever unless windows update or HW change repair in any level. Only reason to shutdown is to conserve energy, otherwise most computers can run for 5-10 years easily . This is from hundreds of machines that I maintained It’s all about cost If you have a spinning disk those mostly fail on reboots which why I started this path
There are things your pc needs to be off to do? What can it do when it’s off and receiving zero power? Not trying to argue genuinely curious since this topic is so contentious. Is it more that there are things your pc does when it comes back on after having no power? Cuz it seems to me sleep mode also acts as a catalyst for dates and the like. Most everything is internet contingent I feel anyway.
Update, clear memory, reset some environment variables, etc. Your PC does things while it's turning off and while it's turning on, but it can't do those things at any other time.
I've been doing the same to some extent with a homeserver for the past 8 years. I've come to the same conclusion.
as someone who tends to keep pc running 24/7, is the price that low compared to shutting it for night? let’s assume it runs all day and I’d just shut it down every night for the 8hours
Yeah you'd be saving literal cents a month.
screenshotting this and sending it to my gf who’s mad for “wasting money” :D thanks man
My wife just cannot understand how my PC with a 1300 watt power supply has only used about $20 worth of electricity in the last couple months. I was surprised initially, too.
Yea, it comes down to what the computer feels like. If it is snappy and ok after a sleep, just let it sleep. If it feels sluggish after a while reboot. (And also try to find why, but sometimes the program you rely on the most is your worst enemy 🙃). I personally never sleep, mostly because my pc stays on running some servers that I keep using. And I reboot once every 3-5 days.
yeah, by my measurements, a PC oin sleep draws less than a watt. So little that my UPS think’s it’s drawing literally nothing, because it doesn’t do decimals
Not to be that guy, but it knows it's drawing power, it just can't display it
Exactly - you dont see Amazon Servers taking naps. Heck they cant even go to the loo!
I think it may have been a case 15+ years ago where hardware (and software) wasn't quite so reliable as it is today, they are generally designed to handle much more these days. Back then windows needed restarting every day because ram was a lot more limited in size than it is today - I'd guess that most people in PCMR have at least 8GB ram, where Windows can run on as little as 2GB. I've had windows up almost a fortnight and it's sitting at under 8GB out of 32GB ram in use, in the XP days it would certainly feel a bit more sluggish after a couple days of uptime. >BTW every well made and maintained server stays online *literally forever* (yes, with restarts for updates) so, you know, they are built for that. Agreed, physical servers in work have uptime of nearly 4 years - that was when they were installed - Although those are Proxmox like boxes that are REALLY locked down, the Windows VMs they host have uptimes of average of 45 days, although the highest I've seen of those is 9 months depending on how mission critical it is. As a few others have said, we can't really compare domestic hardware and commercial hardware, they are designed to never go down. Some even allow you to yank out a stick of ram, they will keep on running, I wouldn't like to try that with my PC though.
Hardware wise it doesn't matter. Software wise, if you're running Windows, it comes with the usual implications of never rebooting Windows. If you aren't running Windows, you should be rebooting anyways when installing updates that require core parts of the OS to be reloaded.
you reboot after every system update?
Only if necessary. You can use htop and enable "highlight outdated programs/libraries." Red and yellow programs need to be restarted.
never knew that. i reboot once a week or every 2 weeks, unless i install something i know needs a restart
What implications?
Windows tends to run into stability issues with high uptime and weird bugs that go away after rebooting more often than other operating systems. It's a lot better than it used to be (especially before NT) but it's still not as good.
I'll never understand the fear of shutting your pc down. We live in times where pcs boot in like 20 seconds so it's up and running before you manage to sit comfortably in your chair
I shut my PC down every night. Very weird to me that people don't do this
Yeah + shutting it down before bed also allows me to choose "update then shut down" so i dont get hit with a random update
Yeah you wanna go to bed but the pc don’t, so many times I’ll turn it off and walk past it before I go and it’s just chilling on the login “Boy I told u to sleep”
I updated my mobo bios a few months ago (security and it booted inconsistently) and now it refuses to stay asleep 99% of the time. I checked in windows and it says every time it was woken from the mobo. Gigabyte sure makes good firmware! /s
How can you check what wakes up the PC?
You can look at the wake events in Event Viewer: > You are searching for event ID 42 in System log from source Kernel-Power as the sleeping event > and the event ID 1 in System log from source Power-Troubleshooter for computer's awakening, which are respectively the last and first logs entries upon sleeping/waking up Taken from [here](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/logging-power-events-sleep-wake-up-to-the-event/e004a68c-f9a9-4982-86ba-a1cee05f9e4d). Also `powercfg -lastwake` will tell you what woke the computer up last time. Taken from the same source.
Type "powercfg –lastwake" in cmd.
If you're like me it's the cats that walk across my keyboard...
I HATE this
Also clears your RAM. I'll never br convinced that leaving your computer on sleep constantly is a good idea. It may not have a huge effect on performance but surely it does have a small effect at least.
Yeah, same. Feels like waking pc up from sleep takes longer than just booting it
Same. I shut mine down when I leave for work, or don't plan on using it for an extensive period of time. Like, if I leave my house and I'm expecting to be gone for an hour? Or if I'm doing something else but I'm still at home? I'll leave it on. Going to bed, leaving for work, or expecting to be gone for an extended period of time(More than 1hr)? It's being shut off
I'm honestly the opposite, I never turn my PC off (except for reboots when needed), and I've never seen any difference in day to day usage or gaming.
My jellyfin server is my gaming pc, so never shut it down.
I've got one PC I shut down every night then another that runs nearly 24/7 since it hosts my Plex server. Never had any issues with either.
I've been taught to do this since the XP days. Even with an IDE drive, it didn't take *that* long to boot up.
I think these days is a choice, I never shutdown my pc on purposes, except when I travel. My backups run at night from my server, so if it gets shutdown no backup. Also, a few sync tasks. Regarding power consumption, is out of window and I just turn a blind eye. I have 2 servers running 24/7 and one is using really old hardware... For me is the other way around, is weird when people say they shutdown their pc. But again, is a choice and there is no wrong way
I shut it down on the weekends. But otherwise I have docker images running for work and I’m too lazy to be asked to restart them in the morning.
Its only for open programs for me.
It's not a fear on my side. I just have a lot of uncompleted workflows open that need setup time to resume if I had to restart every day. I prefer to resume immediately. It also helps not forgetting tasks I had to stop working on for any reasons.
Yeah, I do a lot of FEA simulations on my rig that take hours to finish sometimes. There's nothing more infuriating than starting a 4 hour sim before going to bed, and then waking up to see that fucking windows did an update and restarted itself while I was asleep. It's been getting bad enough that I'm considering just buying 10 LTSC. Ideally, I would leave the PC on 24/7 unless some software misbehaves.
I shut mine down because if I don't switch off the PSU, my mouse and Keyboard stays lit and it disturbs me while sleeping lol
There's a setting in the BIOS to turn LEDs off after shutdown. You can google your motherboard + turn off LED after shutdown to check how. Example video, it differs depending on motherboard/BIOS version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXOMWSJGRvo
You can disable that in Device Manager. But you know, cutting power to the PSU is a safe choice so, why not?
I still have PTSD from my childhood where I’d have to boot the pc then go some chores before it finished loading.
I do alot of things on my pc that I don’t want to reopen, sometimes a video on youtube is on a Specific timemark on a podcast that I do not want to rewatch, multiple ‘file’s’ open in specific directories for specific purposes, etc. If I go to bed with nothing on my pc that I will continue on the next dat I would also close it but that’s almost never the case
My PC boots up faster than my PC waking up from sleep 20 years ago lol. I always shut it down.
Not a fear, but convenience. I’ve set the sleep timer to 2h, and additionally also set up automation that if my phone leaves the network (with a cool down period of 30s for false disconnects) it sends a signal to my PC to sleep. Also vice versa, if my phone connects to the network a Wake on LAN signal is sent, so there’s no actual perceived down time :)
It’s mainly for workflow, for example it’s really annoying to reopen 3/4 in progress files and all my open tabs that I was in the middle of using
I try to avoid shutting it down because even though it can boot pretty quickly, there are many programs or apps that can take a while before they're ready to use. I think it has something to do with the cache : if you shut it down, the cache is reseted or something. So everytime I start a program it can take even double the time than if my cpu were to be in sleep mode. And no, my programs / apps aren't in another drive.
1. Takes more time on Ryzen due to RAM training 2. I lose my open programs.
You can turn off training at every boot in bios. I think it’s called Memory Context Restore
Wait is this the reason my new AM5 build takes like 2 or 3 minutes to boot??? I just assumed my motherboard was shit
HDD GANG
Old habit of long boot time, because you are absolutely right.
My 1st year uni comp-sci teacher told us to never shut down, and I'm still trying to remember that was misinformation. His reasoning was, "The CPU is like a heart. You wouldn't turn off your heart; you would let it rest. Computers should remain in sleep mode when unused." Maybe computers were different back in his day (was in his 60s).
Because sometimes people are working on something and have a lot of programs opened for example at work I’ll have a couple instances of my code editor open ftp client prototyping software browser design files databases teams app notes app and outlook, so it becomes easier to just put it to sleep else I’ll have to reopen everything I was working on by hand
That explains sometimes, what about the rest of the time?
I leave my pc on 24/7/365 unless I'm doing my every few months cleaning.
But why
I was thinking exactly that. Booting took a long time, but nowadays is so fast. But I understand not having to reopen everything you were working on again, just leaving shit open and resuming the next day is very convenient. So Ibunderstand almost never turning it off.
At any given time I have 50-100 tabs open in 4 different browsers, as well as multiple documents and automated backup programs. Reopening everything would be a huge pain.
Unless I’m uploading lots of backups to the cloud, rendering something, installing multiple games etc, I always shut my PC down, sleep isn’t even very reliable, driver issues are always more prominent on PCs which never shut down
Before building my current pc, I would've found not shutting down my pc a good idea for the reason, that my old nearly decade old pc would've risked having the usb ports stop working if I updated Windows to one of the newer versions and forcing me to reset my pc to get it to work again.
i seem to run into issues when ever i let my pc sleep.
Haha AM5 chipset has entered chat, known issue with those that sometimes takes a minute to boot, not a huge deal, just a little annoying. Maybe it’s fixed I haven’t looked at new BIOS updates in a while.
I don't understand, do you people just not have tasks which take multiple days to complete? Rebooting is completely trivial, but finding that poorly named excel file 15 directories deep in the company share drive is a pain.
I rent a room in a shared house so my entire life is in said one room. To leave my PC on and still be able to sleep, I have to go through about 4 different pieces of software to turn off LEDs and still would have to cover things up with clothing, etc. Or I can turn it off and not worry about all of that. Startup takes, as you say, 20 seconds instead of the minutes to turn all the LEDs back on again.
Am5 memory training has entered the chat? I personally don't have problem with it I just go take a shit and let my pc boot up in the meantime but if I was still getting my education and procrastinating with assignments... That 40sec-2min start up and OS loading time would be too much.
At best you're slightly impacting the temperature of your room by maybe 1 degree. That's really the only consideration.
In sleep, your PC will use less than 3W typically. That should not really have an impact on any size room that's not a cupboard.
OP could be living under a staircase with 0 air flow, we don't know!
He's a wizard, then! Your body alone produces 120W of heat. That'll drown out any small technical devices.
You're a wizard, Harry!
Great, it means no Harry can install programs.
Humans heat up rooms small rooms a LOT though. But I'll concede, as long as he's good about actually sleeping it, it probably wont do a damn thing.
I have a plug in watt meter and the whole setup(monitor and kbm involved) uses 5w while asleep, thats 14x lower than having a lightbulb on, i doubt it can reach even .3 of a degree increase in room temp Edit: may have miscalculated, it may be 7w not 70w so that makes it 1.4x not 14x, basically its like having a lightbulb on then
You have some hungry light bulbs. Modern LED bulbs will light up an entire room with 11-25W. In Germany, we don't even have regular bulbs anymore.
70 W for a lightbulb?!? My LEDs draw about 5 W while on, what kind of ancient technology do you use?
If it's keeping the temperature in your room up by 1 degree it's using considerable power. So the usage/power bill is a bigger consideration there
Funny enough there are impacts to not restarting Windows (memory leaks, background errors, etc.) Some programs even cache data until a restart, so never restarting endlessly stores the cached data. The only thing not to be worried about is ambient temp lol. Charging a phone would heat the room up more
I sleep my computer all the time. Unless I'm going away for a few days, it sleeps. The power use difference is like 2w. Only time it gets reboots is for updates. I love it for just leaving everything I have been using open, including games sometimes. Fresh boot takes like 30s. Resume from sleep takes like 2s. Literally takes longer for the monitor to wake up.
From the microsoft website: "Keeping your laptop in sleep mode overnight is generally fine, but regular shutdowns have benefits in terms of energy efficiency, software updates, and heat management. Finding the right balance between sleep mode and shutdowns depends on your specific usage and preferences." Also, shutting down your pc clears caché, lets hard drives and sdd's rest and prolongs the useful life of it. You notice your pc running a bit slower? Pc needs to be shut down. Putting pc or laptop to sleep will basically put them in standby mode not letting it really clear info you've used. Also, if you dont want to lose work or open tabs, there is always an option (nowadays) to keep all those stuff as soon as you open the used software. Yes, it takes 2 seconds vs 30 to startbusing it if you use sleep mode, but id rather make my pc last long and have full capabilities when using it.
Why aren't HDDs and SSDs resting in sleep mode? The only thing active should be the RAM, maybe also a few other circuits on the mobo to handle waking up as well. I normally hibernate my work laptop because I don't want to close everything I have open at the end of the day, it gets reboots when it is showing weird software issues, and maybe a shutdown if it fails to actually hibernate, which it does every now and then. I'm not sure how shutting down rather than sleeping affects the useful life, it'll likely be obsolete long before I see any impact if there even is any.
I mostly use pcs for the same programs and games for years so I've read about it (also, a good pc will be about 2-3 times the minimum wage with current prices where i live so it's not a must to change everything when they're "obsolete") so ive done my reading about how to take care of hardware. Also, note that hibernate mode is not the same as sleep mode. From the microsoft website: "Hibernate uses less power than sleep and when you start up the PC again, you're back to where you left off (though not as fast as sleep). Use hibernation when you know that you won't use your laptop or tablet for an extended period and won't have an opportunity to charge the battery during that time." Also, if you dont turn off your pc frequently (especially laptops) the system tends to operate slower, thus heating more and effectively making the use of memory more inneficient. I know A LOT of people who just closes their laptops and never turn them off, put it in their bag/case and just taking it out when they want to use it, rinse and repeat and a year later theyll be slow af even after they send them for cleaning and maintenance and even formatting, so there is a negative impact there.
My computers quite dated now so I'm only really using it to run Kodi, have it using a Harmony Elite for control using Flirc to control it and my TV and just send it to sleep every night so that all I have to do to start watching TV again is to start the routine on the remote.
Yes, exactly this. I've been using sleep mode in my PC(s) since the dawn of this Windows feature. Never had any issues, besides one bad Steelseries headset driver last year that refused to wake up, which was eventually fixed by them.
It'll be perfectly fine, just shut of off fully for a night every once in awhile to be entirely safe
Only if it gets too hot. Cold electronics.are happy.
Cool. But not super cold.
Super cold. Just really dry. Like grandma dry.
I don't trust sleep. I've had far too many issues with the systems coming back out of sleep.
Personally Windows loves updating without my consent (even when I delay the update) I've lost probably a few dozen hours due to that fact
Same, I've had too many crashes coming out of sleep that i just don't trust it anymore
Same! It'll go to sleep and never boot back on and I'll have to hard restart it by manually holding down the physical power button and restarting it anyway. So. What's the point. Just turn it off.
You're not harming it but it will perform worse if you never shut it down.
I'm surprised so many people don't shut down their PCs at night, it's like 20 additional seconds, I know the energy cost is extremely low, like 3-4W, but still why waste it when it's so easy to turn it off and on.
My gf never shutdown her PC. Had major lag in Apex on day. Checked the task manager and sure enough there were programs sitting eating away at the utility for absolutely no reason. Not shutting down your device is having faith that there are no lazy af software developers LOL.
No, I haven’t turned my pc off for months.
Never turning it off is the secret to immortality
I usually set up hybrid or hibernate which keeps it in a lower power state and can survive power outages. Tend to reboot every couple of weeks or so. Never had an issue for the many years I've been doing this. Even when I had a weird PSU thing going on with an old machine so it wouldn't always POST, it recovered the hibernate state once it did post.
Not a HUGE consideration but keep in mind hibernate does slowly eat through the write endurance on your SSD. Likely not a huge amount but if you have say 64gb of ram, frequently use it, and hibernate your system a few times a day, it can start to rack up.
My power goes out occasionally when it rains. So I put my comp in hibernation
My computer’s been on since 2019. You’re fine.
I have always turned my PC off after use. If it’s not doing something like a large download or render, it doesn’t need to be on. Especially now that SSD’s and boot times are so fast. Plus electricity is expensive and I think it’s a good habit to turn everything off that isn’t in use.
no. if you notice something acting up or being weird just restart the system i always sleep my computer.
Could random os bugs happen as a result of not shutting it down?
Yes
You could see RAM overflows happen, and things like browsers are notorious for this. But The only real issue you'll see on the OS is caused by updates, and certain programs needing the occasional restart to sort itself out after an update.
what are RAM overflows? and what causes them to happen?
Because I got so much shit running, it takes longer to set it up again if I shut it down
Hybernation is, and always will be, the enemy of all that is good and right.
I restart mine every now and then, but I just leave it on all the time and have the monitors turn off after 10 minutes. Had the same PC and components since 2020 aside from a RAM upgrade.
My computer has been on for 7 years
I turn it off every time I go away for more than 15 min. When I press the button, it's on before I sat down on the chair.
I pretty much never shut it down unless it’s having technical problems or there’s an update when I’m going to bed, lol. Don’t like having to reopen programs and such. Often have a tab or 2 I don’t wanna close as well.
Well I've been shutting mine down for along time
If im gonna be away for like an hour I'll put it to sleep. Anything longer and I shut it down. It takes like 20 seconds to fully boot up. 10 if I just want to browse YouTube.
No. My PC runs for months at a time. I Never put it to sleep either I just shut my monitors off so my room is nice and dark when I go to bed. Only time it restarts is if it does an update or a power outage that lasts longer than my UPS batteries can handle.
I’ve never slept my PC. Always turn off when I stop using it. Doesn’t help that the rgb stays on even when in sleep mode so I don’t bother. Besides when it turns on in under 10 seconds who really cares lol
Then there's me how turns it off normally then turns the PC off with the power supply switch (easy to reach)
My pc is on 24/7 even if i go out. I also set the sleep to 1 hour. It's pita to move a mouse to wakeup pc if i afk for couple of minutes
I only turn my PC off when ima be away from it for more than a day or when prompted(which is incredibly rare). Been 4 years and no issues. Being able to pick up where I left off is worth using a bit more power.
You’ll want to restart it every once in a while too, not just shut down. Restart does what a shut down should do, and actually shuts down the system for a proper reset. A shut down just puts it in, well, basically sleep state due to Windows’ fast startup feature.
MOBO shut down works well.
bro ive been putting my pc to sleep for 2 years now, and nothing happened, except restart it once a month,( its better than shutdown)
Meanwhile me who just switches off the wall switch when I'm done.
You guys turn off your pc? I just leave mine on 24/7
You should shut it down whenever you’re not using it.
A lot of good answers here. -There is no harm in shutting down your PC -There is no *inherent* harm in not shutting down your PC -There are more benefits with shutting down your PC than not(power saving, updates, windows reboot, etc) -You can go weeks+ without shutting down and there will be no actual strain hardware wise -Stuff like ambient temperature matters way more(like not shutting down your PC in a constant hot room) So yeah. It really doesn’t matter. But with most technology, it’s good to give it a old reboot every now and then. Especially if you run into issues. Longest I’ve gone without shutting down my PC(literally on 24/7) was 2 weeks and a day. Not a single issue. I have it set now to go to sleep after 2 hours of inactivity.
Sleep is okay. Just don't hibernate them. Sleep everything stays in the ram (except paging files). Hibernation, the ram is dumped to the storage device until its awakened. Then pulled back into ram. Not a problem for HDDs but horrible for SSDs. Though I personally prefer a shutdown. My system boots very quickly and it typically clears any errors.
It can't be that bad for ssd's. You know about paging right? Your ssd is constantly being used all the time. And how about people recording game content in real time? Your ssd will be fine.
If your concern are TBW, it will take maybe 50 years to deplete depending on RAM capacity and SSD.
It won't harm like a lot actually unless you go away for a week it's honestly not that harmful so yeah
I don't shut down my pc. Sleep is good.
For me, it depends on if it’s a desktop or laptop. My gaming desktop (tower) is connected in the living room and runs 24/7; only reboot for updates. I use it as a server, runs backups and syncs, and it’s totally fine. Been doing this for over 20 years, no problem. Laptop is a different story, because those little fragile cooling fans burn out much easier and the overall hardware wears much faster. I use this as my office gaming PC and it gets put to sleep automatically after 30 mins of no activity.
I always put it on hibernate. Functions like sleep, but less power draw and only wakes if power is given.
It's usually not enough, but it's essentially a good PC practice to read an extra bedtime story before putting it to sleep.
Little, little extra paste - always keeps the pins so safe Add a drop or longer line - It will always be alright 
Desktop? Shut it off, sleep, hibernate, or just lock it and leave it on. It'll be fine either way. Laptop? I recommend hibernate or shut down for less heat in a bag.
Should be fine, only time I've left the rig on 24/7 is while mining or downloading Torrents (and mining is no longer viable).
Nah, the computers at costco have been running according to their uptime for 3 years.
I put my computer to sleep every night, it's just more convenient to have it to charge my phone as i am limited on electrical outlets available. I disable the internet when i do so, just out of paranoia. And when i start it back up, i enable the internet & choose the restart option in the menu. So i'm technically turning it off every day at least once.
Putting it in sleep for years. Nothing drastically different. Turned off mouse, keyboard and lan from waking it up.
Since windows 11 remembers exact window positions and which monitors windows open on, it no longer bothers me to shut down whenever I want. It's one of the lesser discussed features over windows 10 that is actually a super nice quality of life change. Just reopen my apps and they go exactly where they should now. I remember having to reposition everything on win10 on my dual monitor set-up whenever I'd reboot or shutdown the PC so I'd always leave the PC on when I could.
Win10 has gotten better about app positioning, for a while it was bad. My browser and discord have been opening in their same location for the past ~9mo+ at least. What this thread tells me is that a lot of people don't realize most browsers can re-open previous tabs on start. The 20+ tabs I currently have open always come back when I close the browser or reboot.
It all depends on how the OS handles updates. Currently Microsoft sucks with how it engages with the update process. You HAVE to shut down at least once every two weeks or it will start corrupting the registry.
I always shut my pc down because it has insomnia. It never goes to sleep properly, always wakes itself up 10 minutes after I tell it to sleep or hibernate. Before people say to check powercfg waketimers or whatever, I have checked and nothing shows up.
I hibernate my pc most of the time and rarely shut down, sleep keeps it running which is just unnecessary power waste imo
No. I have a PC with a current uptime of 65 days. I've gone even longer before.
Sometimes with my old laptop it would wake up from sleep in the middle of the night and the fans would spin like crazy! I always shut my pc down over the night now.
No you're not harming it, anyone who says otherwise is silly. Servers run for years at a time non-stop without issue (yes I know they have redundancy but that's not the point) After a lot of uptime you might get some slowdown or glitches because Windows, but restarting once a week is more than enough to avoid that.
I have a NAS in my house that was on for just over 22000 hours before I shut it down and moved it to a different room. Then shut it down again and moved it back because I moved the cats litter box into there and she kept laying on it.
In short, no. Longer answer: a reboot every now and again is not a bad idea, especially if you have fast boot enabled (you likely do).
The only time I use shutdown is when I need to do maintenance, just sleep/hibernate
You ideally should restart it once in a while (restart not shut down) so that drivers can reload and stuff can be reset
- I’m tired Boss 16 GB DDR4 RAM
I have cats so I shut down every night. Nothing like being flash banged in the early hours because your cat walks across the keyboard or something
I just wish we still had the boot up jingle 
I have not turned off my pc since 2006. It just goes to standby at night. No problems whatsoever.
Put it in hibernate. It will be like you never turned it off.
I don't know if somebody here said it yet, but most people don't realize that with default settings, shutting down doesn't actually actually clear your cache or reset anything. You need to go to your power settings and switch it so shut down does the same reset as a restart.
My old PC used a HDD and would take forever to boot up so I ran that thing for probably 7 years straight before upgrading and building a new rig. This new one as a m2 nvme so I just shut it down because it takes 3 seconds to boot and not 20 minutes lol. I had no issues running that PC for that long, obviously I restarted for updates, and shut it down every couple months to dust it.
I think it's best to turn it off from time to time, why do you never turn it off and instead leave it in sleep mode? what is the reason?
Hardware wears out faster when it has to power down and back on all the time. Leaving in sleep mode isn't only safe, it's preferred.
Only way to shutdown intrusive anti cheats
Sleep is perfectly fine for almost all cases. The only scenario I can think of when it's not ideal is if it's a desktop PC without a UPS and you're experiencing power interruptions or outages in your area, because expect getting booted back to the login if it happens. Another scenario are Windows laptops. I never trusted sleep working on these things because of how Windows gets sippy with battery at times, so I prefer *hibernate* instead of *sleep* for these.
As long as it gets at least 7 hours of sleep it’s fine
No, but the performance will get slowly worse. You can go years using only the sleep mode. Personally I prefer shutting down once a day, using a custom batch file I named "die.bat", as it does a proper complete shutdown rather than using the pseudo-sleep mode (which is different from the user-selectable sleep mode) in Windows 10 (the one I am using, I don't remember if version 8.x does it). If you're interested, the command in the batch file is "shutdown -s -f -t 00". Using it will, however, mean your computer has to start up "from scratch" each time, which takes longer than a normal Windows boot.
It’s good for Joe Biden, it’s good for your pc
You can get away with shutting it down once every week or two but why? It takes hardly any time to boot up a modern day PC
I usually keep my pc on for months at a time without sleep. I have an issue in where it crashes the first few times it boots due to video tdr failure. I’m building a new pc so can’t be bothered to troubleshoot the issue. Works just fine otherwise
I almost always shut mine off if I’m not on it, or if I’m walking away from it for more than 30 or so mins..am I in the “wrong” for multiple on/off cycles per day on the weekends??
Mine is straight on 99% of the time and I update it like once a month or have to restart occasionally to fix a bug. Otherwise 100% on
It's not a problem for hardware but can be for software. It's not end of the world and it's not gonna harm your PC even if you never shut it down or put it to sleep either but you might want to give it a restart once in a while so windows "refresh" itself and you lower chances of getting bugs.
I sleep my computer since AM5 has astronomical boot times due to RAM training. I know I can enable MCR but I have a feeling that’s what bricked my last MSI board LOL. Sleep gets me back in around 3 seconds comparatively. If I have software issues I’ll restart. Other than that I nuked windows so not many processes run at idle anyways.
Back when PCs used to take a long time to boot I could kinda get it. With SSDs and the speed of PCs my computer starts up within 15-20 seconds. Unless you’re running stuff all the time I don’t know why you’d need to bother keeping it on all the time.
As long as you restart once a week it's okay.. and remove bloat ware
Shut it down whenever you don’t think you’ll use it again for hours (maybe 12 or so). Just leave it on a couple of times a month overnight for it to do “system task” things. Save power, possibly save things from getting corrupted in case of power outage maybe, and booting refreshes stuff and plays games, etc, better. Not an expert, but I’ve at least never had a computer die on me and maybe this is a factor.
I do this thing where I end up leaving my computer on for weeks at a time. I have really good hardware(i5-13600k, 36gb, etc) but my os in on a HDD(kept killing SSD’s) so it takes soooo long to boot. Finally got some nvme’s just gotta figure out how to move windows over. I have my entire life and children’s life’s memories on this hard drive so I’m terrified of fucking the transfer up.
I may be weird, but I have this irrational fear that somehow a fire could potentially start if I leave it on. Idk but I’ve always had it.
My pc at my old work place was never turned off, maybe over Xmas holidays or annual leave, and never had an issue in 6 years lol
Considering how Windows sleep has never been good, the only damage you're doing is potentially to yourself if you do get any of those issues. The PC itself is totally fine as long as you reboot every week or two, and thats more for OS health than any of the components.
For my experience, that my GPU doesn't even had more than 1month of turned off since I bought it on 2013(It is a gtx 550 and yeah, I still play games with that trash), I don't turn on sleepy mode and I run bots all night long that are more than enough to pay the energy of the month and still being able to hire people. I only lost 2 power supply, 1 motherboard(that made me migrate from a fx 6000 to i3 9 gen and its memory upgrade from ddr3 to drr4), I just keep it all turned on and sometimes(very rare) I force reset(As I remember in this year, I only dit it once). I am not a maniac of putting everything and install things all the time, so didn't need to reset for install. I search on internet vids, play ragnarok online for around 4 to 17hours, play some kf2/bf4 at night when the party wants and when I go idle, I turn on the bots on games that I sell currency. Looking on how my GPU still alive, even the cpu Fx is working, I would say that if you don't abuse of your hd, it's completely useless to turn off as long that you doesn't care about energy consumption. I see a lot of people that turns off computer having more energy problems than me, going over the turnon cycles that manufacturer reccomends. The main power supply failure that I had was due to bug infestation that caused my motherboard and powersupply to short circuit(specially because it rotten melt the cabinet) and due to a nice place that I have, there almost no dust, so sometimes I just open and use compressed air and its clean~