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Will my PC get damaged?
Rob_Clarke1
Posts: 41 Forum Member
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I leave my PC on 24/7 a day and never turn it of, does anyone else does this? if I don't turn it of, will it damage my PC? I just bought it a few months back before I got sanctioned from Job Centre, its a new system with tower and LCD Monitor, took me ages to save up for it mind, its also Windows 7, I am glad its not Windows XP as XP is not safe anymore since the support ended. 
Just worried that's all, glad I got a PC as I need internet for Job Searching
Just worried that's all, glad I got a PC as I need internet for Job Searching
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However while LCD monitors don't suffer screen image burn as much earlier CRT monitors did, why don't you turn off your monitor anyway, save a couple of quid a year.
However there is a couple of caveats to all of the above, should your property suffer with an electricity spike or even more unlikely get hit by lightening, nothing will take out a PCs motherboard quicker.
So there is a lot of merit to the argument to unplugging your PC, and I mean unplugging it and not just turning it off.
I'm sure you are but if not back up your document's you will never regret it.
Win 7 is fine and you can set it so your PC goes into hibernation----but still not the same as turning it off----but I don't bother with it.
I'd agree with the comment about watching the dust build up mind
If you do pay the electric bill you'd notice a significant reduction in cost if you turned the machine off when you're not using it.
It wouldn't matter so much if it was a laptop, but towers can eat through energy even if you have the monitor turned off.
I have a pre-payment meter to top up my electric with a key.
You'd save a lot of money if you turned off the PC when you're not using it, especially given that you're on a key meter.
My friend had a shitty meter plan and a ridiculously powerful computer, and it was costing him about £5 a day to run when it was on 24/7. Yours may not cost anything like that, but it's still an appreciable cost.
My PC at work has been on for about 5 years, no problems with it at all.
I always hibernate my home PC when not using it, with hibernate it boots up quicker. Many PCs use about 100 watts and if you leave it on 247 your electricity bill will be quite a bit higher.
Forget hibernate, just turn it off when not using it.
My laptop is set to sleep when the lid closes then after 3 hours of no use it hibernates. that means that during the day it comes back to life instantly but worst case is 20 seconds. You need to have wake timers enabled because it will wake out of sleep in order to hibernate but that shouldn't be a problem.
I get the benefit of an immediate start most of the time whilst also gaining reduced power consumption. Although truth to tell the difference in consumption between sleep and hibernate is pretty minimal.
So if your PC uses says 50W of power (a conservative estimate) and you leave your PC on 24x7 then its costing £50 a year to keep on. If you switch if off or hibernate for just half the time then you are saving £25 a year, even more if you PC uses more power or you pay more for your electricity.
The downside is that most PCs don't have particularly good PSUs and as their power demands drop the PSU falls off the bottom of its efficiency curve. With a decent PSU I'd hope that an idle PC would be down at 10w or less assuming HDDs had spun down.
I still think the people should power down computers when not in use or at least get them into sleep mode. Waste is waste and I don't like it. I consider it poor management and something to be embarrassed about
I have a PVR which has a brilliant 'feature'. Rather than leave it in standby mode you can set it to 'low power' mode or something where it consumes less than 1 watt.
Brilliant money saving idea........except it won't record any programmes if left in this mode! How silly is that!! So it has to be left in standby.
My other PVR is a Humax HDR (Freesat) box. It has a 1w mode but it will wake up a couple of minutes before a recording is due (or fifteen minutes before if 'accurate record' is enabled.
When not doing anything all you see is a glowing red LED bar. Right now it's recording something so I also see the clock and a couple of icons. It brought itself out of 'deep sleep' to do the recording. It'll go back into a coma when it's done