Leave it on or leave it off

[kap]

Is it better (hence long lasting) to leave our PC desktops on all the time? A good friend who is a programmer at SCE already told us that it costs us very little.

[Racer X]

with modern LCDs instead of CRTs, and deep sleep mode, I just sleep mine (or let them go to sleep)

My old machines with CRTs or those that don't deep sleep, I power them off.

[mattkime]

Leave it on. sleep more works very well

[tuqqer]

I sleep mine as well. But there are a huge number of things that get fixed every time I restart my Mac every few days.

[mikebw]

I vote for the sleep as well.

[MacMagus]

Is power your main concern? What kind of PC?

While LCD's *generally* use very little power in low-power/sleep mode, computers often use a significant amount of power even in low power mode.

Computers (and obviously laptops) that use laptop cpu's and have the appropriate software running on them *may* use very little power when asleep, but you can't count on it.

I suggest that you get a Kill-o-Watt and see for yourself what the difference is between active and sleep-states.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202443274&listingid=5668435

...

If your concern is wear and tear on the PC, I wouldn't worry too much about it. The average upgrade-cycle on a corporate PC is somewhere between 18 months and 2 years. If it's leased, maybe you've got 3 years. The components you're stressing with the power-cycling -- whether shutting the thing down or sleeping it -- are probably going to last more than 3 years on most of your PC's even with the additional strain of the rapid heating and cooling, spin-up, etc.

[Racer X]

[quote tuqqer]I sleep mine as well. But there are a huge number of things that get fixed every time I restart my Mac every few days.
Yeah. I will ammend my answer to include that I do a full power down, and restart every 10-14 days. 2-3 times a month basically, and I run Onyx and Disk Utility then.

[Article Accelerator]

All current Macs support deep sleep. In that mode, none of them uses more than a few watts.

Mac Pro -- 7 watts
iMac -- 2 watts
Power Mac G4 "Sawtooth" -- 4 watts

That's "night light" territory...

[mikebw]

My Beige G3 had a "sleep" mode, but I didn't seem to be anything more than shutting off video output. Power supply fan remained on full even in sleep.

But yeah, the new ones are much much better.

[volcs0]

Our machines are always on. Our "media" G5 is set to never sleep and hard drives to never spin down. My MBP is always on - restarts for software updates or kernel panics. My work PC is set to never sleep, as I need to RDC into it frequently.