6 sleep modes or leave er on all day?

[Thefishtank]

the title is my question.

is it better to just leave my pc on all day and randomly use it to check stuff or put it to sleep at most 6 times a day...usualy not that many times.

[lethargik]

sleep mode is probably better, although I do not know if waking up from sleep has the same effect on the PSU as turning it off/on. in hibernation or sleep mode (whichever one that auto sleeps the pc when not in use) the pc is basically using very little power.

[BicycleMafioso]

Make use of hibernation if you have it.

I personally completely shut down my system when I know I won't be using it for an hour or more, but I've removed the hibernation-stuff.

[Karteli]

On machines that get hot, I noticed that when they stay warm/hot for a long time, they tend to want to stay that way. When they are cold for instance (just starting them up), they may have problems, or be unstable, until they get warm again - then they are golden. Mostly applies to machines constantly left on for days. Also leaving them running increases dust buildups inside (on all the boards), even with filters.

I wouldn't leave the computer on sucking full power when it's not being used anyways ... but 6 startups a day might be hard on it too.

Sleep / hibernate / energy star settings would be a good thing.

[taekvideo]

If you have a good hdd and relatively clean system you can just hard shut it down and it doesn't take too long to boot it up when you need it... that's what I do... have it setup to automatically login on bootup so I can take a piss after I press the power button and it's fully loaded when I'm done xD
I don't really like standby... always seems to cause problems/bugs for me.
Don't leave the pc on all day though if you don't have to... it's not good for it or your electric bill.

[sizzlinsauce]

i leave mine on. never hit my 16gb of ram cap lol. if i do turn it off this stupid buggy ASUS Formula IV 990x board has to go through bios first then my SSD -_-

[Cilraaz]

Make use of hibernation if you have it.

I personally despise hibernation. It's the same as sleeping, but longer to recover from. Instead of storing data actively in RAM, it caches it out to disk. Great if you're expecting a power failure (though why do you have unsaved data open while sleeping your computer?), but a waste of time, hard drive space, and drive wear-and-tear otherwise.

OP: There's nothing wrong with sleeping your computer multiple times per day. It saves on the power bill and doesn't harm the components.

[taekvideo]

i leave mine on. never hit my 16gb of ram cap lol. if i do turn it off this stupid buggy ASUS Formula IV 990x board has to go through bios first then my SSD -_-

What does ram have to do with it?
ps. I assume you don't pay your own electric bill? >_>

[BicycleMafioso]

I personally despise hibernation. It's the same as sleeping, but longer to recover from. Instead of storing data actively in RAM, it caches it out to disk. Great if you're expecting a power failure (though why do you have unsaved data open while sleeping your computer?), but a waste of time, hard drive space, and drive wear-and-tear otherwise.

OP: There's nothing wrong with sleeping your computer multiple times per day. It saves on the power bill and doesn't harm the components.

We have thunderstorms pretty often here. :3
But in all honesty, I don't like either. I use the one on my laptop where you close the lid, but it too has an SSD, so I'm not worried about waking-time. My desktop is either on or off. No in-between. ^^

[Deleted]

Doesn't turning on and off of your computer take equally as much energy as 4 hours of playing on it? I'd say: Keep it on all day, unless you're not using it for a half day or more: then turn it off.

[taekvideo]

Doesn't turning on and off of your computer take equally as much energy as 4 hours of playing on it? I'd say: Keep it on all day, unless you're not using it for a half day or more: then turn it off.

no.. it doesn't take extra power to turn your computer on or off

[Cilraaz]

Doesn't turning on and off of your computer take equally as much energy as 4 hours of playing on it? I'd say: Keep it on all day, unless you're not using it for a half day or more: then turn it off.

Your hardware uses energy when it's in use. It doesn't care if it's loading an OS or playing a game. The 30 seconds of boot time is equivalent power usage to 30 seconds of game playing.

[Rixis]

Doesn't turning on and off of your computer take equally as much energy as 4 hours of playing on it? I'd say: Keep it on all day, unless you're not using it for a half day or more: then turn it off.

it's a wee bit late, but i'd love a little more clarity/links to numbers about this if possible

[Kewi]

My monitors shut off after 45 minutes, and my computer shuts down after 2 hours...


I let the system take care of shutting down my computer since I usually use it in spurts and do not know if i'm coming right back to it



and IIRC, Hibernate = writes RAM to HDD, and does a full power down
Sleep = Suspends to RAM, still uses a light/moderate amount of power

[FlawlessSoul]

Your hardware uses energy when it's in use. It doesn't care if it's loading an OS or playing a game. The 30 seconds of boot time is equivalent power usage to 30 seconds of game playing.

Whoah, Cil, not quite. Certainly depends on your hardware, but while your hard drives might be drawing the same on boot as they do in-game, your graphics card certainly isn't!

I'd certainly agree that a boot would take the same energy per second as idling - probably a bit more, at times, and likely averaging around the same as web-browsing.

[taekvideo]

Whoah, Cil, not quite. Certainly depends on your hardware, but while your hard drives might be drawing the same on boot as they do in-game, your graphics card certainly isn't!

yea the boot time probably draws less power than gaming.

[FlawlessSoul]

What I do is have my computer slowly sleep/shutdown.

During normal operation, CPU/GPU downclocking happens automatically. After five minutes of idling, it will turn off the monitor. Five minutes later, hard drives will power off. Ten minutes after that (Idle 20 minutes), the machine will Sleep, and finally hibernate if still idle 10 minutes later (half an hour total).

This way, I can walk to the loo or go for a cigarette and not have to wait for it to start up. If I have to walk away longer, it's not a big deal anyway, just pushing the power button no matter which mode it's put itself in.

[BodycountQQ]

sleep mode is better than hibernate. hibernate puts all your data on the hard drive I believe. Windows still needs to boot up then it reads that data to go back to its previous state. sleep mode i believe puts all the data into memory. so when you turn it back on it's instant on again.

i plugged in a watt meter in my computer. tested it shut down and in sleep. when it was shut down I was pulling 37 watts .. when it was in sleep mode I was pulling 40 watts. so to me shutting down wasn't any real benefit. i put the meter on my ups which was powering everything which is why it's so high.

[Rixis]

the advantage of shutting it down being that you can unplug it so it's not able to draw any electric

[Cilraaz]

Whoah, Cil, not quite. Certainly depends on your hardware, but while your hard drives might be drawing the same on boot as they do in-game, your graphics card certainly isn't!

I'd certainly agree that a boot would take the same energy per second as idling - probably a bit more, at times, and likely averaging around the same as web-browsing.

You're right. I forgot to include "for the components in use". That's what I get for posting during raid.