In a recent thread ([Link: remotecentral.com]), buzz stated that his office computer is always on and he turns his home computer off when he's not there.

A totally obvious possibility is that it's dangerous (if he uses HDDs) to leave the computer on all the time compared to only having it on when he's using it. On the other hand, perhaps booting a hard drive is more likely to damage it than running it 24 hours a day. (And when I was doing a project in Saudi Arabia, my desktop was on for up to seven weeks at a time.)(With Teamviewer I could go to sites that were forbidden by the Saudi IPs.)

A Digital Trends article [Link: google.com] suggests (my paraphrasing) that I should leave it on since I'm likely to otherwise turn it on and off more than once a day.

That article was written in 2015 when SSDs were more expensive, and the way that SSDs age is different from what happens with HDDs. In particular, Hibernate writes A LOT of stuff to the drive compared to sleep or shutdown, so Hibernate might not be the best idea if you have an SSD.

What's the latest? Does anyone here know?

I never shutdown my computer (desktop or laptop). The only time i restart is when software tells me to...usually after an install or update. I don't use hibernation. For my laptop i just close the lid when im done...when i need to use it again i open it and login. With my desktop i just move the mouse to log back in.

Saying you don't use hibernation, then saying you just close the lid, is possibly contradictory. I used to have my laptop set to hibernate when I closed the lid.

What do your power settings tell the computer to do when you close the lid?

I make a point of power cycling an item no more than once a day. (Unless I’m testing a control system) I agree that power up is very stressful. With respect to booting the hard drive, the drive goes to sleep after a while. Waking is nearly as stressful as power up. Certainly, one could make a point that there is quite a lot of disk activity during boot up. It’s a voice coil driven head and there is very little wear for seeks.

Why should this be? Power supplies can easily be made so the voltages come up from zero in a controlled manner, and anything run by a power supply could be designed to carefully limit how power is applied to different circuits while the voltages come up to working voltage.


I'm surprised that you say this. We get to choose when it goes to sleep, or even if it goes to sleep at all, when setting the power profile. It doesn't go to sleep after a while, it behaves the way we define it to behave (within the limits of the choices we're given). Nothing about a hard drive going to sleep is out of our control.


If this is so, why isn't it designed to be stressed less? I can only conclude that this isn't true.


That last sentence seems to contradict the one before it.

My desktop is, and always has been, on 24x7 with no mechanical HD sleep.

On the other hand, in order to save power, my family's desktops all go to sleep (not hibernate, which isn't needed on a desktop unless you're really worried about unsaved data and losing power).

Yes, parts have gone - usually power supplies - and those almost always go on a power off/on cycle, which DOES stress everything the most. But it's happened to both my desktop that's on 24x7 (usually fails when I turn off to do an upgrade or cleaning or something), and to my desktops that go to sleep all the time.

Believe it or not, I've had power supplies fail on desktops that were NEVER turned on, but just sat supplying standby voltage for a couple years in a row. In fact, that's happened twice on the same system (if you care, an old DOS Pentium system I keep around for nostalgia purposes).

Now, as for mechanical hard drive start/stop cycles - yes, those will kill drives. Manufacturers rate drives on the number of cycles before failure. But I've seen proof that drives are a lot more resilient than we think.

Here in Toronto, a certain generation of Rogers DVRs were poorly programed to have sleep mode on the drives enabled for like a 10 minute timeout, but then to also do cleanup duties in the background. So, when the boxes were "off", the drive would soon shut down, and then a few minutes later start up again to do some minor task. Then 10 minutes later, shut down. Then start up again. Over and over. For YEARS! I had 3 boxes doing that (including one in a bedroom that drove me NUTS), and yet I never had a drive fail.

I use my computer like someone who maybe should utilize hibernation but i never do. IMO it causes system instability and having it set to sleep (instead of hibernate) allows me to leave applications/documents open etc.

So let me rewrite a bit:


The reason I'm on you about this is that I'm asking what you do and you say you just close, or open, your laptop. That's not what you do. First you choose all those setting, and THEN you close or open your laptop. A person cannot take that advice as you presented it and, from that, understand what you are doing. The graphic shows the rest of the answer.

At power up all of the power supply’s capacitors are likely discharged and will present as a near short circuit to the charging circuit unless there is some circuit resistance. A diode is rated for a certain number of these events. Intelligent power supply design can soften the power up current draw risk for follow on components.

At college the main computer had a massive 19V power supply. We never intentionally turned that thing OFF because after only a few power cycles the 800 pound power transformer would fail. None of the service techs wanted to take that service call.

Another aspect of power up/down is the temperature cycle. Each part in the box is rated for a certain number of cycles of xx degrees depth.

With respect to my home computer, it is a calculation. Over time do the costs associated with power cycle, disk spin up/down driven failures overtake the power use and air conditioning costs? On that computer I had a hard drive failure after a year or so, a power supply failure after about five years, and a cooling fan a year ago. I’m now on the third mouse. It’s an early i7 based machine that is still not a slacker, but I would not recommend doing any heavy video editing on it. Yes, it would start up faster with a SSD, but I don’t sit and watch it boot.

It’s had a good run, I’m plotting it’s replacement soon — there have been three blue screens in as many months. Hopefully, by the time I’m ready to pull the trigger we will have better resolution of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

First i choose all those settings...once...like 3 years ago.

I wasn't offering advice. I was explaining what i do. Anyone interested in more information can ask for it or google it.

You were telling what you do, yes. But the idea was to get information about what happens, and "closing the lid" doesn't tell what happens. Closing the lid is just the act that initiates those choices you made years ago. THOSE THINGS are what happen.

Your post wasn't specific. You didn't ask me to list the steps i take. And here we are at post 12 and you still haven't listed the model number of your computer, the operating system or your ISP.

This is all non-specific. The issue started as "What's the latest? Does anyone here know?"

I don't think anyone here has provided a computer model number or ISP name. How would that have helped us know what happens, that is, what you actually do, when you "just close the lid"?

And, again, I must say that

would be a total contradiction if you've set the laptop to hibernate when you close the lid. Obviously you don't, but that shows that there's a whole world of choices that ARE the thing that you initiate by closing the lid.

Temporary software glitches, any sort of malignant software that gets itself into memory (but can't permanently install itself without triggering security prompts), accumulated resource usage, and so forth, are all tempered by restarting. I shut my actively used machines down at night and turn them on in the morning.

Automation controller/server type machines, where are never used directly, never run a browser or any end user GUI applications and such, aren't as much of an issue on this front. But end user machines, they are all subject to accumulated stresses and weirdness and shutting them down at night and starting them back up in the morning is a good thing to do.

I don't believe there's any remotely significant stress related to this in modern systems, certainly not enough that would override the benefits of regularly letting them start life from scratch again.

To me, hibernation modes and sleep modes are the worst of all. It's incredibly difficult to debug issues that occur because of going into these modes, so probably lots of software products have bugs related to dealing badly with these modes being invoked. They may not be the immediately fatal kind, but easily can be the accumulated damage kind. Then you start wondering why your machine is flaky.

Turning off the computer is the machine equivalent to a good nights sleep. Leaving it on is the equivalent of never sleeping at all, and that's never good for anyone. Sleep/hibernation modes are the equivalent of tossing and turning, where you supposedly got some sleep but really just feel worse when you wake up.

How anthropomorphic!