I have a i5-2500K and it has been going strong for over 10 years now. The only time that I shut it down is when I clean the computer once a month. It still looks brand new to this day
Pro electronics repair tech here. The info about electrolytic capacitors was well-explained, but it should be emphasized that heat is the thing that kills caps the quickest, whether cheap ones or good ones. Leaving your computer on but idle generates little heat, but leaving it on while it's maxed out (crypto mining, running distributed computing apps, or video/3D rendering) can expose the caps on all the boards to more heat than usual. This is part of why good case ventilation is key. And yes, solid electrolytics are much preferable to old-style liquid electrolytics, as they're more heat resistant and they perform better even when brand-new. Great video! Edit: The reason liquid caps are used in power supplies is that solid caps of the needed capacities and voltage ratings would not fit in the allotted space, and would be prohibitively expensive.
@@mastershooter64 Surface mount capacitors (what all modern electronics use) require tools to replace that the average computer enthusiast does not have. You absolutely can replace them but you have to have a hot air station at a minimum for most surface mount components.
@@mastershooter64 They can be replaced, yes, but easily? Have you ever tried to desolder a cap from a multilayer pcb? And while solid caps are usually surface mounted, it's still a lot of work.
After like 5-6 years of almost continuous use my old cheap monitor died. I looked inside it and replaced a bulging cap in the power stage. Now its been running for another 4 years and counting. :)
@@writerpatrick On modern displays, the second most likely reason seems like the driver mosfet or controller going out, found a Samsung TV and it has a known issue where it's really hard on the leds which kills both the mosfet and the leds unless you turn the brightness down.
Story time: my friend's dad runs a pizza restaurant and has 4 PC's to run the registers and stuff. There is only one spot in the entire kitchen they can go where there's an accessible outlet and there bluetooth is in range to keep the registers running, anywhere else they can't power them without tripping on a power cable or the registers' proximity alarms go off when they're farther than 7 feet from the machines. These PC's are right next to the oven. The oven exhaust vent. On the floor. They also haven't been turned off in years, the longest running one has an uptime of 4 years and not a single stick of ECC RAM. There is no ending, this crime is still ongoing. Nothing has gone wrong yet. YET.
Software security ways that is scary as no matter what os you are running there will be bugs in the kernel. Kernel updates often don't become effective untill the computer has been fully rebooted, this means that a machine which hasn't been rebooted in 4 years may have 4 year old vulnerabilities which makes it very easy to attack that system.
this is very hardware-focused, i wouldve liked to hear about reloading drivers, clearing cache and tmp, and other things that could corrupt an os if left on for a rly long time
The reason I turn my computer off at night, or if I'm going away for more than a couple of hours, was not so much about worrying about the components but about the electricity consumption, both electric bill wise and environmentally. Otherwise I just put it to sleep.
Modern computers are generally very good at energy savings. Mine consumes about 30 watts when idle and with the screens off, my fans consume the most when idle. If I get more efficient ones, I can probably knock a few more watts off. Some components and slots can even be individually powered down if deemed unnecessary, windows can cut power to the PCI-ex slots when the screens are off for example. HDDs not being used can spin down. The CPU can be throttled down. I like to run web services on it I can access through the internet when I'm away. File/media/remote desktop server etc. It's kind of the mainframe of my household and some of the web services are also accessed by friends. I sometimes host games on it.
Third world country here. Electric bill is pain for me with small income (2/10 for bill itself). So i only do three cycle like morning, off, noon, off, night, turn off.
Fun fact: Hard drives typically have a longer lifespan when in continuous operation (assuming you disable the park setting). Spinning up and down is pretty tough on ye ol' spinning rust.
Never buy anything with aggressive parking, like WD Blues or alike, those "energy savings" will be lost in new drives in 2-3 years by 2-5x times the value saved lol...
@@egg-roll8968 WD Greens, you mean. Blues have a pretty long idle wait time before parking the heads onto the ramp. Edit: At least, the latest ones. My WD10EZEX from 2021 takes a while before parking.
@@wolfdale_3m I see you have a 1TB, Blues past 1TB are Greens in disguise I thought only 500GB was safe from the issue apparently not and 1TBs are too, they merged them into one name when they killed off the Green line and it was a "selling point" for years for the Blue line like the Green. Bought a 6TB Blue (via shucking, it had a store stock blue label on it, SN showed it as blue as well) died fast with over 180K parks (827 days on). Look at your park counts in SMART vs other drives. All but 1 of my 5 year+ P/O drives have fewer than 10000 parks, the 2 that are close to 5 years on time had power cable issues go unnoticed by me for a while so their park counts are higher than they should. I own 3 greens as well only one is still living lol... At least last time I powered it up it was. It's still in their listing: "advanced power management features ensure low power consumption", also in Canada they want me to pay $1 more than normal price for your drive "on sale" lol... Also the internet is full of complaints about the WD Blues with parking issues.
@@egg-roll8968 I felt the same Green vibe while I was looking at the data sheet before purchasing. I noticed that there were no Blue models larger than 1TB that spun faster than 7200 RPM. Suspicious indeed.
This. At the end of my USB HDD's lifespan I was afraid to turn it off. Every time I would turn it on the spindle would stutter. It's become so bad now that sometimes it can take up to an hour for it to finally spin up. Once it's up, it's completely fine.
I currently use my gaming laptop as a headless game streaming server, hidden in the closet under the stairs. It’s on 24/7 and works beautifully, but I should probably disconnect the battery before it explodes from abuse and sets the house on fire
Depending on age that is a non issue. My laptop has not been unplugged or off fore months other than occasional reboots. The battery is currently at 97% charge yesterday it was around 98 day before 99 etc. It will follow this trend till hits 94% at which point it will begin charging till it is at 100% and then the cycle will repeat. This is to prevent over charging my laptop is from 2014. I see people all the time freaking out because their battery is slowly draining while plugged in and the "csr" for hp dell etc go through all these steps to resolve the issue which of course comes right back because this is not a flaw or a error but is by design. Other wise like a cell phone left plugged in all the time eventually your battery will die a painful needless death lol. Now in your case if you have no need for a battery back up on it sure pulling the battery is fine. In my case i need to take off the bottom and while easy it is to much hassle.
I'm pretty sure many laptops already have a feature that enables running it straight from the wall bypassing the battery even when it's inside automatically. Also, if you want to preserve the battery I think it's better to keep it somewhat charged when not in use. So having it done automatically when it goes below a certain threshold is probably more convenient. Not to mention being able to keep it running to not lose data or cause issues during due to an outage seems like a nice feature. You might want to read up on it to set it to the optimal charging scheme. Some of the things I mentioned are from distant memory though, so any corrections are welcome.
@@ghosthunter0950 yep some old laptops forget the full cut off date had um lets say issues with exploding batteries. This was a failure in various protection circuits or lack of. Modern machines mine again is 2014 all have a built in system that cycles the batter between full charge and 94% at 94% it will top the battery off to 100% hold it there for a while then allow it to slowly discharge. This is to preserve the battery.
@@ghosthunter0950 @nanaki I had a 2020 model chromebook battery bulge on me because I had been running it from the wall just last year. Thats not a gaming laptop, but if you cheap out it can still be an issue even on newer devices.
For most consumers that don't need remote access or use their PC for work, I cannot see why you would leave it on all the time. SSDs have reduced startup to seconds, so shutting down isn't likely to affect anything. The power draw from the wall and higher energy bill should be reason enough to shut it down.
@@ghosthunter0950 Depends on which sleep mode. There is one where RAM remains powered. And there is one where RAM is dumped to the HDD and then shuts off completely. The second is effectively the same as shutting down in terms of power consumption.
@@NeonGen2000 dumping memory to the disk and shutting off is usually called hibernation. Strangely enough, most of the newer systems I've touched have those disabled by windows by default.
When I was in high school in the 80's, our comp science teacher was adamant that we not use the power switch. Sort of makes sense if you think that each PC would have been turned off and on dozens of times a day, that really was the part most likely to break. So, partially, because a generation was trained to never use the power button. But also because for many years afterwards, really until the prevalence of SSD's for boot drives, booting up could take several minutes. I've recently started using "sleep" and find it no slower to get back into windows than just leaving it fully powered. Nearly instant in either case.
@@shibu5175 Odd. I set my new laptop to do that and it's great. Super fast, even better than sleep (no apps change, everything is EXACTLY the way I left it) and basically no battery draw.
I work in a DC for Americas largest bank and we still have some "Compaq Proliant ML370 G1's" in use. Circa 2002. Still with the original 9.1GB hard drives. So 20yrs old and still going strong.
I would like to add that having it 24/7 can have some long term software performance problems due to temporary files, cache data... This can be easily correct restarting it each several time, but it has not the top performance during all the time until you restart it.
This is a whole lot less common in up to date OS's. You can go weeks or months without any noticeable performance drop with modern hardware and an up to date OS.
Except that on Windows, a restart clears these and a shutdown does not (unless you have gone out of your way to disable all fast-boot related settings)
This does not require a reboot. Those items such a temporary files and caches can be cleared and taken care of without a reboot, especially post windows 7 era.
15 years, holy cow. Also, SMART isn't always going to alert you to an issue, drives can easily die without warning. However, it's a great tool and I definitely recommend keeping an eye on the stats.
This video is complete BS. Each electrical/electronical/mechanical component has work lifetime measured in hours. If you left it on it shortens. And that is simply it - probability of failure increases. If you do not operate server or mining platform, there is no good reason to leave computer on all the time.
@@aleksazunjic9672 Not really, heat cycled are worse than down time idle running. The lifetime is meant for servers running at higher power and temperature so you have some idea how long it should last. If it's running cool at constant speed like HDD it works just fine for years. Some agressive early power down caused the drive to fail because of too many load and unload cycles.
@@jan.tichavsky Nope, and wrong. Every component has estimated lifetime, MTBF and the fact of life is that leaving equipment running simply shortens its life. Heat cycles (in fact work time at elevated temperature) are important for some classes of equipment, but in general they are not that important. For example, HDD with its mechanical parts suffers wear and tear even if you run it near perfect temperature. It is much better for HDD not to spin at all then to work constantly.
Been running my Mac Pro from 2009 24/7 for a long time now, sits there mining all the time now when I'm not using it and the only issue is the amount of dust it gets inside from it. And it's been heavily upgraded to still be useful in 2022, even if it's still a beastly 12 core machine...
I have a monitor that I bought when Circuit City was closing, and it's still running strong! It's my second monitor now since I finally bought a second display last year.
What typically break components and electronics usually isn't really dust or running the PC hot all the time but rather the difference or change of temperature the electronics go througth. Microsolders are made of metal and metal doesn't like having large difference of temperature getting quickly applied to it, it ends up breaking and in electronics, it means connections are not doing their job anymore and the electronic in question ends up not working. Dust simply exacerbate this process where the heat transfert cannot be done as efficient as before and prevent the ventillation to be as good or as designed. 😊 Where an PC idling is most likely to be within a similar temperature to if it was off.
@@johnnygotti1568 Yeah trucks are utility and business owners like to keep them running with proper maintenance that most individual car owners don't bother with.
You would need millions of normal thermal cycles for any damage to occur. People get this idea from PS and Xbox consoles that die from turning them off. That is because of dust they overheated and ran in an overheated state for a long time damaging the silicon bumps. A restart allows it to cool and it breaks. The 1 thermal cycle makes its death obvious but it was not the killer.
@@johnnygotti1568 I just typed up a paragraph about how right you are and deleted it accidentally. Can't be bothered to type all that up again, but you are so right about heat cycles.
I've had 4 PCs in a row that went 7 years each before i replaced them. mostly due to software issues (windows fighting with drivers, causing various issues. Basically components becoming outdated is a major issue. Except in one case where the heat sink on the CPU got clogged with dust bunnies-back in the early pentium era where they had large attached heat sinks and a small fan-and the CPU fan melted off). I've only had to replace things like a graphics card once, and RAM 1-2 times. And i run my systems nearly 24/7, because i spend so much time on them and don't often sleep long so i want to be able to just get on and get back to doing stuff instead of waiting for it to boot up. Plus want to be able to hear notification sounds if anyone tries to contact me when i'm afk
Similar to me, 14+ hours (raised due to COVID) and no issues, recently been trying to turn it off when I sleep but I have gotten so used to the white noise I now have trouble sleeping with it off :( However I can probably get used to it
I also never turn the computer off. I just pause or close most of the programs and send the computer to idle. A modern PC only draws as much energy in idle as an old style light bulb.
I've generally kept my systems running 24/7 since I got my first 8088 machine. In the pre-2000 days, it was generally considered good practice and would prolong machine life, as power-cycling older components could introduce more wear-and-tear than just leaving it on all the time. After the early part of this century, however, this had pretty much ceased to be a concern and powering down and then on again as often as you wished wasn't a huge problem. But I left mine on all the time more or less out of habit. These days, now that I work from home exclusively, I'll often have jobs that run overnight anyway, so again my systems stay on all the time. I just have to remember to replace my HDDs from time to time. 😋
I run my desktop 24/7. It's way over 10 years old. I replaced the original hard drive in it a couple of years ago with an SSD. I built the computer myself and bought top of the line parts at the time. It still does everything I want it to. It can do a lot of things at once, such as download large files, play music, and write documents. I keep it on 24/7 because I do have things going on occasionally that need all night to accomplish. For example, copying a major amount of files from an older drive to a newer replacement takes over a day, because it involves terabytes of data. Also, I sometimes download files from Usenet and many times have days of downloads queued up. Additionally, I like to just go to the computer any time, day or night, and work without having to wait for the computer to boot up. I don't know if it still applies, but I had heard years ago that powering up a computer put heat stress on some parts, shortening their life. So I just let it run. It still looks brand new, as I clean it often.
I think it really depends on the build and how well you cool your rig. Have my I7-7700 1080ti 11g on pretty much 24/7 running heavy VR loads/video/graphical rendering/recording pretty much all my games. Still benchmarks just under what it did 5 years ago.
Over my years, all the PCS that I leave on 24/7 has lasted for well over a decade and still going. The ones that turn off are usually replaced within 3-4 years if not sooner due to hardware issues.
I heard lots of stories from people experienced and it also happened to me as well: When the time comes, 9 out of 10 times, you shut down a working computer and it never boots again. That's usually how a computer dies due to age if not user's fault like liquid damage or dropping etc. If a PC living down the stretch and you don't know when it's gonna die (usually happens about 10+ years old PCs or 6+ years laptops) it's usually better to not shut down because you can't be sure if it's ever gonna boot again.
Just disable the auto update. Only run it when you are going to do regular maintenance, which your pc will be turned off anyway. I run several windows VM and hypervisor, they are doing great for months before i updated their software or clean their case.
So I've had my PC for 11 years now, and it's been running basically 24/7 for all this time, monitors included, apart from a week here or there when I was on vacation. Most everything still works. One thing failed - AIO, and it required replacing. Also I'd be nice to replace the fans too - they're still working just fine but have become slightly louder probably because the bearings are failing.
This is kind of a funny coincidence---I just had a case fan start making weird-ass squeaky/grindy noises this morning... luckily it's nothing mission-critical
I work in tech repair, and we had a customer come in this week with problems of apps not starting, apps freezing, and apps stalling. A reboot fixed all of these issues. It turns out they had never powered off their laptop in the 3+ years they'd had it. I don't know what, internally, causes something like this to happen. My gut says either the RAM or SSD index got corrupted from wear-and-tear, and rebooting rebuilt it enough for things to work again. I don't know, though.
I seriously do not understand why some people do not reboot their PC or phone when it acts up. Every time I ask friends or family members to reboot they think it is some offensive thing I am saying to them.
After a month or something Windows just starting to act weird. Take updates on top of this and you have a recipe for a disaster. I kinda supporting mandatory updates and reboots in home versions because that way they can keep devices secure and make sure that customers reboots their PCs (and use Edge, lol)
@@vadnegru Forcing someones computer to reboot at any given time is always a bad idea since a lot of people have systems that are setup and rarely ever touched or checked again unless something goes wrong with it, it would be a massive anti-consumer move. Also, I can not count how many times I have had to deal with a broken system because Windows rebooted in the middle of the night and failed to update properly which resulted in a boot loop which eventually breaks something after going through the strain of the reboot process over and over again for hours on end. It's happened to me twice and at least a couple hundred computers I've fixed over the years. Not to mention the huge inconvenience it introduces to anyone that is not in their ideal fit of a common user.
@@TheChemizzle that kind of stuff was in early days. It have set its time to reboot outside of active working time and as far as i remember it already on in home versions and public backlash are not that big. Compare it to many of exploits and virus attacks due to unpached OS and we have some choice to make for developers.
In my experience, you don't really need to worry about turning off your monitors as your pc will automatically stop sending signal to them after a certain time of being idle, which will quickly trigger the monitor's low power mode with the display off. But if you have a program preventing it or disabled that setting, then yeah turn them off if you're not going to be using it for a long time
0:43 Even less than 3 months. Back then I was an IT service technician, we often found motherboards and PC power supplies with dry capacitors. The worst of all were companies like Dell and HP which blamed the damage on the user ("misuse") and did not honor the warranty, customers had to pay for the repair, often multiple times!
I have a Maxtor with over 9 years of uptime recorded in SMART, its a minor miracle it still works. I have it simply to see how long it lasts now, i don't use it for storing anything i car about. One thing I am curious about, I believe that for a HDD, the start up routine is the most stressful for it, when its suddenly dumped with electric and told to start doing things, so I wonder if in this regard, it is kinder on them to keep them constantly running, rather than lots of start ups on them?
I have a Maxtor-branded Seagate PATA HDD, a historic oddity from the time when Seagate had just bought out Maxtor. It's physically around 14 years old and has about 12 years of powered uptime with around 120 power cycles, it's still going strong. Power cycles are by far the most stressful thing for a HDD. It has to deal with the sudden jolt in wattage when it turns on and the spindle motor has to spin up to speed, both of these things will wear out the mechanical components much more quickly than just having it powered on. HDDs face almost no wear once they're up and running, in fact, so long as they're not the kind to aggressively save power and power themselves down all the time. Laptop HDDs are the most notorious examples of HDDs dying from power cycle wear. Even discounting the added shocks and vibrations that a mobile environment would place on them, the constant turning on-and-off of laptops means those HDDs have probably had to undergo far more power cycles than their desktop cousins. If you want your HDDs to live a long life (and you don't mind the power bill), keep them powered on.
the key to extending your components' lifespan is maintaining a constant temperature. the more the temperature fluctuates, the more problems you're gonna have. something something thermal expansion
Maybe I would suggest to look at this software wise. Imagine the clogged RAM when you leave your PC on too long. It got better the last 10 years ... but restarting will give you a small performance boost after long power on time :)
I think the system is cleaning the unused ram all the time, so unless you have a process which is leaking memory and never terminates this should be fine
I agree with this. After 35 days or so of on time my PC starts skipping randomly and lagging, especially with audio playing if I'm browsing through Chrome. A quick restart always fixes it, though!
I dont see why software would be an issue tho. I was managing a few dozen servers once in my life, they all were running multiples windows VM and being on 99.999% of the time. The issues we had with the systems were very minimal.
I run a little radio station and I use an old Core 2 Duo PC to play all of our audio and music 24/7. I only replaced the PSU since it had few bloated capacitor and I clean it for once in a while. But with all of that it runs perfectly. It's common for radio stations that have PC's that run 24/7 because their automation system is vital to run and broadcast content.
Over 10 years ago I worked for the Los Angeles DWP at Scattergood Generating Station, which was a natural gas power plant. At this stations we had old units that had some computers added to them and a general purpose email computer. These computers were only turned off if they failed and needed repair, otherwise they were on all the time. With two of these computers the first thing to fail was the spinning platter Hard Disk Drives. Also our Instrument Shop had to occasionally clean out all the dirt and dust that accumulated in these computers, this was another time that they were turned off.
It's also worth pointing out that leaving your computer running can result in slow downs. Especially if you have programs like web browsers running. They just eat up all your system resources, and the entire system starts to chug. Just shut down your computer when you're not using it. It's not hard, and if you have a fast SSD, it doesn't take long to boot up. Just do it.
You didn't explain why web browsers are bad if you leave them on. Wtf do you mean eats up all your system resources? From doing what? How does it slowdown anything?
@@Tiyratania the longer a web browser is left running, the more ram it will use. And depending on exactly what processes it's running in the background, it can also take up huge portions of your CPUs workload. (But this is generally only a concern if you have a fairly low power CPU. Kind of a thing of the past for the most part these days.) All of this means your computer becomes slow and unresponsive the longer you leave it running.
I am always paranoid my cooling loop - knowing that I put it together - is gonna spring a leak. I like leaving it on sometimes so I can remote in but it’s always in the back of my head!
The weirdest thing about capacitors is they were never talked about as cylindrical electricity containers in high school physics. It was always flat metallic rectangular plates facing each other, sometimes with a dielectric slab in between, that we had to find the capacitance of
Inside those cylinders there is a parallel plate capacitor, and by rolling them up, the space they would occupy if they were not rolled up is reduced. So the theory you were taught in high school is somewhat true.
One thing I don’t see a lot of people mentioning in here is the HEAT it pumps into your room. I was in a door room last semester and my roommate had his big full tower Corsair case with 3 exhausts fans running constantly with all his programs open. I’d come back at night sometimes and get hit with a warm humid wave of air walking in. Between the sleeping area room and the room we had our PCs in there was noticeable 3-4 degrees temp diff. So yeah if your room is cold in the winter just keep your pc running with a decent amount of programs open. It’ll heat the room right up lmao.
This is a amazing benefit for me living in Canada I typically like my room a little warmer than the rest of my family which the PC takes care of (Might be because of my PC lol)
In my 20 years of computer experience, you're much more likely to have a problem when turning a computer on than if you just leave it on all the time. Most serious problems show themselves at startup.
Which is a good thing. Next to the fact that a simple reboot fixes 96% of all computer issues (seriously, this is the first thing EVERY technician will do) there's also an added benefit to troubleshooting. For example, most running PCs don't tell you if your SMART values are bad, but if you boot your BIOS will notify you that your drive is currently dying.
@@Finkelfunk Windows, at least Windows 10 above will spit up errors on logon if your HD has smart issues... I have seen this before... Maybe this is driver dependent, never looked into but, I have seen the Windows error showing "Your drive could be failing, it might be time to replace it" in our office machines.
@@TheCoolDave When my old harddrive died it never gave me an error unless I was restarting so I really don't know. I'm not sure if I was using Windows 10 though.
Especially if you're dealing with (at my work anyway) motor control cabinets, server racks, all the networking components, PLCs, or other industrial automation systems. It's always a good idea to never turn them off. Because when there's a power outage weird things happen for a few days. All of our server networking devices, or servers are on a UPS.
Oldest part in my current PC is 7 years, the harddrive. Still spins, still functions, but you can feel it's age creeping in, feels more like the motor that spins it will go before the plates though.
Yes, the mechanical components on HDDs often fail first once you pass a certain age. You should not turn off computers with spinning rust except for updates. The most significant wear and tear you can do is head parking and spin-ups. HDDs will seldom stop spinning by themselves, but they may not spin up again once you force them to spin down. Head parking is a consumer power-saving feature, not a lifespan feature, this is why enterprise drives don't have head parking or do so very seldomly, the cost of losing a drive exceeds that of the wasted energy.
@@XDSDDLord "the cost of losing a drive exceeds that of the wasted energy." I disagree, running the PC for 20,000+ extra hours would exceed the cost of a HDD. (365 x 8 x 7) . If you don't agree with my estimate of 8 extra hours of uptime per day on average feel free to change it, but I promise you it'll go over the cost of this 2tb hdd.
@@duck74UK Your calculations seem to fail to account for the lost revenue cost of server downtime, wear and tear of rebuilding an array, the cost of a technician to come out and replace the drive, the potential cost of data loss or corruption, among a lot of other things.
@@duck74UK That is beside the point. The point is that because for an enterprise losing a drive costs so much more than running it, the technology there is geared towards 24/7/365 operations because that will minimize failures and maximize the life span and data integrity. This proves unequivocally that running a computer with HDDs 24/7 is better for components' health than shutting it down. The subject matter of this video is about component longevity, not the cost of operation. In that light, I commented to issue a correction to the insinuation made in the video that the continuous operation of your mechanical components is bad. Also, the amount of energy it takes to maintain the momentum of the plater when not actively running IO operations is relatively small, and considering you think losing a hard drive is no big deal, I am going to assume that you've never had a harddisk simply fail on you, and take all your data along with it. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, by all means.
My oldest hard drive has been running for like 10 years. Still working. Only has reallocated sectors as an issue. It's a 5400 RPM Seagate Momentum plus I suppose. Also all my laptops are still running on 5400 RPM Hard Drives. SSDs keep getting expensive in my country because importing them are banned
@@NoNameM9 Sri Lanka, coz we ain't got enough Dollars for literally everything. Honestly Windows laptop prices are skyrocketing here whereas Apple's M1 MacBook Air is literally at the same price as it was in 2020 at my local computer store.
My parents had a really old macintosh, I think it was from the very late 80's and they left it on every day, every night for almost 16 years before they finally got a windows 2000 pc
I once got Windows 95 to run for two weeks without a reboot. I felt like I should have got an award. They key was selecting software that had good memory management built into it. It's also the reason why still today I don't want to write code in a language that demands manual memory management like C/C++, it's a wonderful way to shoot yourself in the foot a variety of ways.
@@savagepro9060 then they make however many extra few tens of watts per household it's a microscopic amount compared to how much electricity everyone's regular appliances suck up
Back when I used an XP machine, it would start glitching if it remained on for too long. Usually 16 hours to 2 days. (The hardware was fine though, software was the issue.) Nowadays it's much more stable. I've left Windows 10 running for days on accident without problems, aside from the electricity bill. On a somewhat related side note, my phone would lose the ability to connect to wifi if it is left on for a straight month, but a quick restart fixes it every time.
I had a similar expereicne with XP but since window 7 I've never regularly turned off my computer and it goes months if not years with only update restarts inturupting it, and I have never seen a problem with either longevity or performance.
I had the same problem on AMD AM2 platform. Had 4GB of ram and a Athlon 3600+ 2 core. It had the same issue on Windows 7! Once held at more then 2 days, the morning i step infront of a computer, the performance was quite worse.
I had an Asus laptop with windows 7 on it back in 2010/2011 or so, I used that for up to about 2014 or so, I had it on once for up to almost 19 days solid once. In context to having a computer that I regularly used, I never broke that record, computers I infrequently used, I broke that easily. For those wondering, I set up laptops on hibernation mode when I closed the lids. Unfortunately, I can't set up hibernation mode on one of my laptops right now because the option is unavailable to do so.
My current pc had a similar problem but it was worse it only took a few hours before everything crashed but it magically went away it also has another problem where it just gets slow but its not as bad because it take a long time before it gets too slow.
I usually just put my pc to sleep when I'm away, and do a full power cycle every week or so. I feel like that's pretty optimal for the lifespan without having to spend any time on it.
I've built my own computers for the last 19 years, I never shut them down outside of doing maintenance, and I have never had any of them die on me. I'm also a power gamer, so I overclock, optimize and do all sorts of unintended things to my rigs. I sold or gifted all of them away when I upgraded to something better, and I know for a fact that most of them are still working. :D
@@divineone1 Downloading, updating, compiling - and the whole thing consumes like 50w on idle... It used to be more important when computers and the internet were slower (imagine booting for a solid 3 minutes and downloading a 700mb movie for the better part of a day XD ), but it's more force of habit now. I'm old like that... XD
One thing I didn't her you mention is Sleep mode. It's enabled on my desktop and powers down the system when it hasn't been used in a certain amount of time, and will quickly resume if the keyboard or mouse is touched. It also allows t he middle of the night automatic updates. The display also goes into sleep mode and will reawaken when it receives a signal from the computer. My understanding is that minimal power is required during this time. I would think this extends the life of the computer as well without having to completely shut it off.
Turning your computer off an on every night causes no harm, it helps windows clear cached data etc. The only strain caused by turning off and on your computer is an HDD spinning up and down, because that's when they endure the most wear
@@jatoxo Actually, shutting it off doesn't completely reset the system, restarting it does. When restarting, you are forcing the system to boot up fresh new files from the hard drive. When shutting it off, sometimes it leaves some files inside RAM to boot it up more quickly or just not get bothered with loading in some stuff. I think LTT themselves did this analysis? Not really sure.
@@jatoxo AFAIK all hard drives have power managment in them so they will spin down when not in use. How long they need to be unused for the spin down to happen varies by model. So unless your HDD has your OS/some other continuously running software it will spin down and up during normal use too.
@@dduleyt You are talking about "fast startup" which saves the state of the windows kernel **on the disk**. It should still help with most of the Windows things that hog your computer if you leave it running for an eternity
You need a PhD in port forwarding ... You also need a miracle so that instructions for turning on port forwarding for your "specific router" are actually on planet earth -instead of Andromeda Galaxy.
Why?? I know that's fine for Linux but restarting for big system updates is still a good idea. Doing a big update and not restarting can cause serious stability issues (especially if you get an nVidia driver update)
Fun video. Liquid electrolyte caps fail if left un-powered for a long time. Hard drives spin down, if not in use, even if your computer is left on. If you have a desktop with a cmos battery leave it plugged in so the clock is not using up the battery, causing an early replacement. With the price of electricity, I turn off, but leave them plugged in, any computer that is not acting as a server. Windows 10 makes it a pain because it likes to update after hours but it saves money.
My computer and monitor both been runnin' for 6 years straight with only breaks to move. Idk guys, she still runs smooth. Had a fan go out only recently.
What about the expanding and contracting of parts with the heat when you turn off and on your computer? If its on all the time that does not happen since the computer is always warm
ive left my pc on for about 8 years nonstop, never had a problem, you should see how many hours my original 2tb hard drive from when i was 14 has, its insane how many hrs it has and still perfectly good
While I do turn off my gaming rig when not using it, I never turn off my media PC... cuz I'm always using it. Forced windows updates are pretty much the only time it ever sees a restart too.
@@micobugija6284 I tried Linux... worst experience of my life. Nothing worked, and when it did, it was buggy as hell. Getting Linux to work correctly is like having a full time job... really not worth it.
I just upgraded my previous computer (a Shuttle XPC with an i7) after 7.5 years, which I left on for about 7 years worth of that time. My SSD was the first thing to expire- too many write cycles, catastrophic failure. After replacing that SSD with another, that computer lives on as the kids' homeschool classroom computer. I make sure to set my computers to sleep overnight now, which has also been saving a surprising amount of power.
Perfectly valid for computers running old, almost extinct HDD's, now with SSD's without moving parts and increased malware and hacking activities, the safest way to protect your computers is to shutdown it every single time you are getting away from it.
@@rossharper1983 The ones I lost along the previous 10/12 years were ALL Seagate drives of 500GB and up. They ALL failed my in less than 2 years, no exceptions
@@MarcioHuser I currently have 67tb in my server. Over the 20+ years I've lost drives from all brands but within the last 5 or so years I have to say Toshiba's have been the most reliable. Currently using a suite of Toshiba 8tb drives.
Sadly my old phenom died 2 years back, so i had to get a new-old-stock ryzen to replace it with, what a wast. 6 month later my old gpu died also. What a sad year. But the.psu is still working
If your computer used 100w on average and was powered on for every hour of an entire year, at the average rate of elecricity it would cost you less than $100 per year in electricity.
I'm using Diskeeper 18 to eliminate unnecessary read/write access using idle RAM. The results are quite impressive and reduce wear and tear on any sort of HDD/SSD. Over a two year period on a M.2 SSD: Read I/Os Eliminated 46% Write I/Os Eliminated 45%.
Fans are made to be replaced, and they're fairly easy to replace. I've replaced a few fans on various computers over the years. I've also replaced the HD on a couple machines, although I was able to keep an old HD running years after it failed the SMART test. Although I mainly leave my computer running overnight because it takes a while to start up.
I have my case fans running for over 5 years, they are cooler master fans, that costed 15$ each... Before that i would change my fans every 2 years after they fail, and also had to listen to horrible noise
Must be lazy people. There is really no reason not to. I only let my PC sleep if I know I'll be back in an hour or two but if I'm away for longer - shutting it off. It's mental.
This show was excellent. I have a Dell Inspiron, an all-in-one microcomputer. I shut it down when not in use for long periods of time with Microsoft Windows 10 Professional. I never press the power switch without selecting the shut down selection in the software. It is nice to learn something else about hardware just as I am learning more about software.
My other problem is our rented house were sensitive to thunder and trip suddenly. So yeah, on and off is a daily thing. Plus the need to save the bill is kinda priority too. I'm still saving for good ups as I don't has one. I pray that my setup lasts longer than a decade. Man, making money grow on trees is hard!
I remember "back in the day," one of the claims made was the heating and cooling cycles could cause the solder to crack. Handling PCB's everyday at work the solder on modern boards is much better (lead free sucks, flows like crap) but I really don't see that as much of this happening today. But I still remember the church I went to keeping their Packard Bell on all the time.
I've had my desktop PC running 24/7 for 8 years continously and it's still working great, I clean the insides out every 1 to 2 years and redo the thermal paste when I clean it out, it doesn't get that dusty, it still works like it did when it was new
Temperature fluctuations caused by powering your pc off and on daily causes expansion and contraction of components that will decrease their lifespan. An old electronics engineer explained this to me and it seems to hold true throughout the 20 plus years of my professional experience. Leave it on and perform reboots once a week to keep the OS updated and you'll have less issues all around.
I have a dual opteron from 2012 and is still going strong! I use it to write my code. Have an old silver stone 1500w silver psu. Still rockin and rollin!
Still using the same PC that I built over 10 years ago. The only thing that started dying was the stock fans that came with the case. Sleeve bearing fans will usually make an audible grinding noise at cold boot, and that's a good indicator that they're on their way out. Every other pivotal component, even HDDs are still operating as normal.
I have an i7-3770K on an Asus Sabertooth Z77 board I built in 2012. I keep in on 24-7-365. I do put it to sleep when I leave it. It has been an excellent setup. I also have 2 Asus 24'" monitors on it, and they are still working as advertised. The only problems I have had are some sticks of RAM have gone bad and sometimes the RAM may have connection issues. After uninstalling the loose RAM and reinstalling it, it will work again.
One of my friends swear keeping his laptop on 24/7 is what makes it last so long. Most regular people I know shut down their computers after they use it. And with modern OS's, it's absolutely not necessary. You can just leave it and it'll go to sleep it hibernation. And according to my friend, if you don't use your laptop for a couple weeks or so, it gets too cold, too humid, things start growing in there, etc. And eventually something fails. But if you keep it on, it'll go to sleep, and it'll keep it slightly warm so laptop stays safe. I'd the battery is about to die, laptop will go to hibernation, so battery is safe too.
Since many many windows versions ago when you click on shut down it doesn't actually shut down your computer... can actually just goes into a hybrid sleep mode. The only way to actually shut it down in the sense of removing power from all the components on the board is to do a restart or pull the power plug. If you install a program and it tells you need to restart the computer and you decide to do a full shutdown and then press the power button to turn it back on the program won't work properly because the computer didn't actually shut down... It just went into that hybrid sleep mode.
I have 2 machines I use on the regular. For reasons I won't go into, one is a laptop that almost never gets turned off, and the other is a desktop that I turn off every night. The desktop was having more issues than the laptop, even though everything inside it specced better than the laptop. It runs more complex software, so I chalked it up to that, until I realized that while I leave the laptop on, I generally restart it almost every day just to cycle it through a total reboot. Since I only turn on the Desktop when I sit down to use it, I would turn it on, then "shutdown" when I was done. Without realizing it, I had been letting the thing go weeks and weeks at a a time without ever actually clearing the caches, and resetting the states and bringing it back through the boot process. This is the opposite of how computers used to be, so even though I had learned that Win 7, 8, and 10 wanted you to restart, rather than shut down, to reboot, I just let the habit slip my mind on the "big machine." (Note, now I usually shut down while holding shift, which does a full shutdown. I could also turn off "Fast Startup" which is the feature that holds onto your cached data and such, keeping you in a dirty computing state through shutdowns.)
During a west-aussie summer, my house gets to an ambient temp of 35-40C, my computer has pretty much been running 24/7 since the day I built it in 2012, it's been through a couple of power supplies in that time, but those were cheap ones. In terms of PC fans, I only have 1 fan that is a once every year or 2 problem, it's a 240mm fan that came with the case, and for that one, I just get the good ol' sewing machine oil out, put a drop into the oil-well underneath the sticker and rubber cap, and hey presto, the fan is good for another year or 2. My monitors pretty much stay on 24/7 too, I get a good 6yrs out of those and I only replace them because they are long out of warranty, but still going strong. Not saying the stuff you have said in the video isn't valid, it's just "horses for courses".
I keep mine on over night and if I'm at home during the day too, when there has been a lot of rain. Keeps the moister/humidity in the air out of the computer. This is especially important if you have issues with dust. I've had a power supply blow up because of extreme humidity from rain and dust in the power supply. Luckily it didn't take anything out, when it blew. Also we see lots of parts in machinery go kaboom in factories because of the exact same reason. Especially if the machine has been standing a few days. Around here some of the factories don't clean thier machines in side at all till something goes wrong, or don't clean it regularly enough. I've had times where I've had to dig out fans with a skrewdriver. Add that with humidity from hot day after the rains or a hot rainy day and the fun begins.
I remember a story that before the old main post office in Chicago closed they found a Windows NT server in a small office that was drywalled off. It had been running for 11 years.
always powered on with sleep mode active is the way to go. best of both worlds: draws very little power and preserves components, and can start back up in an instant even via network.
ran my old rig for 8-9 years 24-7 no turn off. z77 d3h, 4570k, 32gb ram, r9 270x. i don't use it anymore just cause it's obsolete but i bet it would run even 10+ years easily
All my home entertainment and communication is from my desktop. Games, work, video chatting, movies and tv, etc. All my utilities and internet are included in my rent as well. Given all this my computer has about a 90% up time really only shutting it off if I'm going to be away from home more then a day. Built this current one around February of 2021 and everything is still running smooth. In the past most of my computer hardware issues happened when I turned on the computer so I eventually got sort of paranoid and began a habit of only shutting off my screen when not in use.
@ltt: when I was a kid at school the had an exercise bike hooked up to a light bulb switch board that had a power output reader. They showed us what it was like to produce xyz amounts of power by switching on the light bulbs while you rode it, and it was really eye opening to see what it would be like to run a 400 watt cpu. maybe you should do a video like that to make the audience appreciate power and how far we have come.. and what might be plausible in the future.
I’ve been leaving my computer on 24/7 for the past like two or three years to run some stuff to get me some passive income, I only turn it off when something isn’t working right or it crashes (then of course, it’ll force itself to update)
I’ve always had at least one of my computers on for the last 30 years or more and always have had separate servers for different tasks. One for torrenting, one for streaming and one for file serving has been my setup for a decade, until now that I’m trying using only one for those tasks. I’m still not convinced about it but at least I’m saving power and generating less heat as this spring we’re having never higher temperatures than ever before. In fact my servers are my decommissioned workstations, so they are usually heavily used before turning them into servers. With proper maintenance, you can extend their life well beyond the ten year mark.
@paco Have you found a speed/performance difference since adding your torrenting to other function computer? I used to torrent only to a laptop and the speed was reduced by gazillions. Now the Laptop is gone and I don't know where to get torrents from.
Core i7 3820k, built in 2012, been off for less than 100 hrs since then. It's done some mining and gone through several video cards and many hard drives. I still game on on it (definitely not at 4k though.) Video is spot on.
Ive left my Mac pro towers running 24/7 for years. I still use my early 2009 Mac pro tower as a daily user and it's been on 24/7 except power outages and storms, I replace the drive about every 18-24 months. What I never liked is the idea of shutting them down every day, cooling off, turning back on and getting warm, better to have it the same temp 24/7 than cycling up and down. Ive had my towers running 24/7 and never had a problem with any of them or even one drive failure, I always bought used Mac towers and put in a new WD caviar black drive. But since last month I switched my daily user over to a home built box running linux as the Mac OS has become stagnant and older Macs are being deliberately obsoleted by the updated software no longer being ABLE to be installed at all, they have it locked up now to where you can ONLY download and install the updated OSX thru the apple store and it refuses to even download if your Mac doesnt meet it's minimum date requirement. So I could buy a newer than 2009 Mac and pay $600-$900 for it, and again, after the next OSX update it wont run on the 2012-2015 or whatever I might get that's newer. They already made it so you couldnt update to the next update without replacing your GC to a "metal capable card" So I'm pretty done with Apple/Mac in favor of linux mint and I leave the thing running 24/7, only turning off the monitor at night. Should mention I always had my towers on a metal rack shelf in the basement, it's cooler and cleaner there and the internal temps I show right now are 86, 82 and 86F - so about 15 degrees warmer than the basement
My kids machines (2units) are already 11 yrs old. Both still having that AMD AM3 cpu. Within those years the only time my kids turn off their machines is when we have power outages. With power supplies I had them replaced 1 time each and their HDDs around hitting its 9th year as games need more storage. Fans about 2x and RAM upgrades. Monitors, I had to replace them 4x already. Main issue, burn-ins and dead capacitors.
I work at home and whatever hours are convenient for me, so I leave my computer on all the time. I only turn it off when I will be away for at least a day.
My PC is set to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. I also have it set to “wake on pattern match” That gives me the best of both worlds - I save electricity when the PC isn’t needed but it will wake up automatically if I need to log in remotely or access a shared drive from another machine on my network.
I have a system with an i7 4790k, and at longest I had it on for over 500 days, and routinely kept it going for over 200 days. It still works fine to this day and the mobo caps and VRMs are all still going quite well.
My company do investigations to check failures occur in the business network and on the machines itself. They report that 75% of SW failures hitting the IT came from not restarting windows. These are mainly Lenovo and HP notebooks with on board graphics and business operated windows 10. recommendation is to restart every 48h. Some machines are process intense simulation workstations which can’t be turned off for maybe weeks. It sometimes occurs that they give up during several days of heavy workload. I know you are talking about hardware here. But that’s also something to consider.
I have a i5-2500K and it has been going strong for over 10 years now. The only time that I shut it down is when I clean the computer once a month. It still looks brand new to this day
It's an iconic processor
LOL thank you for being the mandatory sandy bridge comment. I thought you guys all died out.
@@lilililiililliil7277 I use a i5-2400 because my local computer shop said am3 is old like he mistaken it for am2
Core i5-2600k here. Exactly the same thing. She's a trooper!
unless you need it to run 24/7 why run up your power bill for no reason?
Pro electronics repair tech here. The info about electrolytic capacitors was well-explained, but it should be emphasized that heat is the thing that kills caps the quickest, whether cheap ones or good ones. Leaving your computer on but idle generates little heat, but leaving it on while it's maxed out (crypto mining, running distributed computing apps, or video/3D rendering) can expose the caps on all the boards to more heat than usual. This is part of why good case ventilation is key. And yes, solid electrolytics are much preferable to old-style liquid electrolytics, as they're more heat resistant and they perform better even when brand-new. Great video!
Edit: The reason liquid caps are used in power supplies is that solid caps of the needed capacities and voltage ratings would not fit in the allotted space, and would be prohibitively expensive.
they're just capacitors right? you can easily replace them right?
@@mastershooter64 Surface mount capacitors (what all modern electronics use) require tools to replace that the average computer enthusiast does not have. You absolutely can replace them but you have to have a hot air station at a minimum for most surface mount components.
@@mastershooter64 You can replace them, sure, but it's still a pain, and a cap spitting its guts out can damage other components.
@@KristopherBlakeley PSUs don't have too many surface mount caps tho. The ones that tend to fail are the round cans.
@@mastershooter64 They can be replaced, yes, but easily? Have you ever tried to desolder a cap from a multilayer pcb? And while solid caps are usually surface mounted, it's still a lot of work.
After like 5-6 years of almost continuous use my old cheap monitor died.
I looked inside it and replaced a bulging cap in the power stage.
Now its been running for another 4 years and counting. :)
I've had a computer I built back in 2011 running 24/7 for 11 years now as a server. It's still fine, although pretty dusty.
same as yours, my benq monitor from 2011 still up and running fine, although had a bit deep scratch from collapsed door incident
It's a very common problem, probably the most common reason monitors die.
@@writerpatrick On modern displays, the second most likely reason seems like the driver mosfet or controller going out, found a Samsung TV and it has a known issue where it's really hard on the leds which kills both the mosfet and the leds unless you turn the brightness down.
We discard too much stuff for just one small piece that cost one dollar. Bravo man, gj
Story time: my friend's dad runs a pizza restaurant and has 4 PC's to run the registers and stuff. There is only one spot in the entire kitchen they can go where there's an accessible outlet and there bluetooth is in range to keep the registers running, anywhere else they can't power them without tripping on a power cable or the registers' proximity alarms go off when they're farther than 7 feet from the machines. These PC's are right next to the oven. The oven exhaust vent. On the floor. They also haven't been turned off in years, the longest running one has an uptime of 4 years and not a single stick of ECC RAM.
There is no ending, this crime is still ongoing. Nothing has gone wrong yet.
YET.
Oh shi- *boom*
Software security ways that is scary as no matter what os you are running there will be bugs in the kernel. Kernel updates often don't become effective untill the computer has been fully rebooted, this means that a machine which hasn't been rebooted in 4 years may have 4 year old vulnerabilities which makes it very easy to attack that system.
@@kim-hendrikmerk4163 Exactly what I thought, and it's even worse that most of them are used as POS terminals lol.
I don't get it, aren't there off days? Why not turn em off for maintenance or sth when everything's shut down
Open task manager and look at the up time of the cpu
this is very hardware-focused, i wouldve liked to hear about reloading drivers, clearing cache and tmp, and other things that could corrupt an os if left on for a rly long time
Applying updates, logging out and rebooting will take care of those issues. Still, these things are NOT powering it off.
if something is corrupting your computer, there is something wrong. whether it is something you can fix is a different story
@@JadedArsenic rebooting is just as good as powering off
The reason I turn my computer off at night, or if I'm going away for more than a couple of hours, was not so much about worrying about the components but about the electricity consumption, both electric bill wise and environmentally. Otherwise I just put it to sleep.
Exactly, thank you!
Modern computers are generally very good at energy savings. Mine consumes about 30 watts when idle and with the screens off, my fans consume the most when idle. If I get more efficient ones, I can probably knock a few more watts off. Some components and slots can even be individually powered down if deemed unnecessary, windows can cut power to the PCI-ex slots when the screens are off for example. HDDs not being used can spin down. The CPU can be throttled down.
I like to run web services on it I can access through the internet when I'm away. File/media/remote desktop server etc. It's kind of the mainframe of my household and some of the web services are also accessed by friends. I sometimes host games on it.
My computer only consumes about 2 watts when in sleep. When idle... That's a different story. 100-110 watts.
Third world country here. Electric bill is pain for me with small income (2/10 for bill itself). So i only do three cycle like morning, off, noon, off, night, turn off.
Bro my electric bill is 80 dollars and I have a 1200 watt psu with a 2080ti with bad electricity it's not consuming that much power bro.
Fun fact: Hard drives typically have a longer lifespan when in continuous operation (assuming you disable the park setting). Spinning up and down is pretty tough on ye ol' spinning rust.
Never buy anything with aggressive parking, like WD Blues or alike, those "energy savings" will be lost in new drives in 2-3 years by 2-5x times the value saved lol...
@@egg-roll8968 WD Greens, you mean. Blues have a pretty long idle wait time before parking the heads onto the ramp.
Edit: At least, the latest ones. My WD10EZEX from 2021 takes a while before parking.
@@wolfdale_3m I see you have a 1TB, Blues past 1TB are Greens in disguise I thought only 500GB was safe from the issue apparently not and 1TBs are too, they merged them into one name when they killed off the Green line and it was a "selling point" for years for the Blue line like the Green. Bought a 6TB Blue (via shucking, it had a store stock blue label on it, SN showed it as blue as well) died fast with over 180K parks (827 days on). Look at your park counts in SMART vs other drives. All but 1 of my 5 year+ P/O drives have fewer than 10000 parks, the 2 that are close to 5 years on time had power cable issues go unnoticed by me for a while so their park counts are higher than they should. I own 3 greens as well only one is still living lol... At least last time I powered it up it was.
It's still in their listing: "advanced power management features ensure low power consumption", also in Canada they want me to pay $1 more than normal price for your drive "on sale" lol... Also the internet is full of complaints about the WD Blues with parking issues.
@@egg-roll8968 I felt the same Green vibe while I was looking at the data sheet before purchasing. I noticed that there were no Blue models larger than 1TB that spun faster than 7200 RPM. Suspicious indeed.
This. At the end of my USB HDD's lifespan I was afraid to turn it off. Every time I would turn it on the spindle would stutter. It's become so bad now that sometimes it can take up to an hour for it to finally spin up. Once it's up, it's completely fine.
I currently use my gaming laptop as a headless game streaming server, hidden in the closet under the stairs. It’s on 24/7 and works beautifully, but I should probably disconnect the battery before it explodes from abuse and sets the house on fire
Depending on age that is a non issue. My laptop has not been unplugged or off fore months other than occasional reboots. The battery is currently at 97% charge yesterday it was around 98 day before 99 etc. It will follow this trend till hits 94% at which point it will begin charging till it is at 100% and then the cycle will repeat. This is to prevent over charging my laptop is from 2014.
I see people all the time freaking out because their battery is slowly draining while plugged in and the "csr" for hp dell etc go through all these steps to resolve the issue which of course comes right back because this is not a flaw or a error but is by design. Other wise like a cell phone left plugged in all the time eventually your battery will die a painful needless death lol. Now in your case if you have no need for a battery back up on it sure pulling the battery is fine. In my case i need to take off the bottom and while easy it is to much hassle.
I'm pretty sure many laptops already have a feature that enables running it straight from the wall bypassing the battery even when it's inside automatically.
Also, if you want to preserve the battery I think it's better to keep it somewhat charged when not in use. So having it done automatically when it goes below a certain threshold is probably more convenient. Not to mention being able to keep it running to not lose data or cause issues during due to an outage seems like a nice feature. You might want to read up on it to set it to the optimal charging scheme.
Some of the things I mentioned are from distant memory though, so any corrections are welcome.
@@ghosthunter0950 yep some old laptops forget the full cut off date had um lets say issues with exploding batteries. This was a failure in various protection circuits or lack of. Modern machines mine again is 2014 all have a built in system that cycles the batter between full charge and 94% at 94% it will top the battery off to 100% hold it there for a while then allow it to slowly discharge. This is to preserve the battery.
@@ghosthunter0950 @nanaki I had a 2020 model chromebook battery bulge on me because I had been running it from the wall just last year. Thats not a gaming laptop, but if you cheap out it can still be an issue even on newer devices.
@@TheFinagle Yeah, cheap chromebooks might not have a way to bypass the battery and get power straight from the wall, so that might be the cause.
For most consumers that don't need remote access or use their PC for work, I cannot see why you would leave it on all the time. SSDs have reduced startup to seconds, so shutting down isn't likely to affect anything. The power draw from the wall and higher energy bill should be reason enough to shut it down.
How about sleep mode?
@@ghosthunter0950 Depends on which sleep mode. There is one where RAM remains powered. And there is one where RAM is dumped to the HDD and then shuts off completely. The second is effectively the same as shutting down in terms of power consumption.
@@NeonGen2000 dumping memory to the disk and shutting off is usually called hibernation. Strangely enough, most of the newer systems I've touched have those disabled by windows by default.
When I was in high school in the 80's, our comp science teacher was adamant that we not use the power switch. Sort of makes sense if you think that each PC would have been turned off and on dozens of times a day, that really was the part most likely to break. So, partially, because a generation was trained to never use the power button. But also because for many years afterwards, really until the prevalence of SSD's for boot drives, booting up could take several minutes.
I've recently started using "sleep" and find it no slower to get back into windows than just leaving it fully powered. Nearly instant in either case.
@@shibu5175 Odd. I set my new laptop to do that and it's great. Super fast, even better than sleep (no apps change, everything is EXACTLY the way I left it) and basically no battery draw.
I work in a DC for Americas largest bank and we still have some "Compaq Proliant ML370 G1's" in use. Circa 2002. Still with the original 9.1GB hard drives. So 20yrs old and still going strong.
A bank relying on 20 year old hard drives in a data center?
Good thing I don't have any money in JP Morgan Chase, Americas largest bank :).
I would like to add that having it 24/7 can have some long term software performance problems due to temporary files, cache data... This can be easily correct restarting it each several time, but it has not the top performance during all the time until you restart it.
Windows moment.
This is a whole lot less common in up to date OS's. You can go weeks or months without any noticeable performance drop with modern hardware and an up to date OS.
Except that on Windows, a restart clears these and a shutdown does not (unless you have gone out of your way to disable all fast-boot related settings)
This does not require a reboot. Those items such a temporary files and caches can be cleared and taken care of without a reboot, especially post windows 7 era.
tmp files do not decrease the performance of your pc
Me: *Never turn off my computer*
My computer: *You won’t let me live. You won’t let me die.*
Ha!
15 years, holy cow. Also, SMART isn't always going to alert you to an issue, drives can easily die without warning. However, it's a great tool and I definitely recommend keeping an eye on the stats.
once happened to me. So I know this to be true.
This video is complete BS. Each electrical/electronical/mechanical component has work lifetime measured in hours. If you left it on it shortens. And that is simply it - probability of failure increases. If you do not operate server or mining platform, there is no good reason to leave computer on all the time.
@@aleksazunjic9672 Not really, heat cycled are worse than down time idle running. The lifetime is meant for servers running at higher power and temperature so you have some idea how long it should last. If it's running cool at constant speed like HDD it works just fine for years. Some agressive early power down caused the drive to fail because of too many load and unload cycles.
@@jan.tichavsky Nope, and wrong. Every component has estimated lifetime, MTBF and the fact of life is that leaving equipment running simply shortens its life. Heat cycles (in fact work time at elevated temperature) are important for some classes of equipment, but in general they are not that important. For example, HDD with its mechanical parts suffers wear and tear even if you run it near perfect temperature. It is much better for HDD not to spin at all then to work constantly.
SSDs are the worst for not giving a warning before they take a dump. In theory they should be more reliable... time will tell.
Been running my Mac Pro from 2009 24/7 for a long time now, sits there mining all the time now when I'm not using it and the only issue is the amount of dust it gets inside from it. And it's been heavily upgraded to still be useful in 2022, even if it's still a beastly 12 core machine...
I have a monitor that I bought when Circuit City was closing, and it's still running strong! It's my second monitor now since I finally bought a second display last year.
Circuit City.
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a very long time.
What typically break components and electronics usually isn't really dust or running the PC hot all the time but rather the difference or change of temperature the electronics go througth. Microsolders are made of metal and metal doesn't like having large difference of temperature getting quickly applied to it, it ends up breaking and in electronics, it means connections are not doing their job anymore and the electronic in question ends up not working. Dust simply exacerbate this process where the heat transfert cannot be done as efficient as before and prevent the ventillation to be as good or as designed. 😊 Where an PC idling is most likely to be within a similar temperature to if it was off.
cars last 200,000 miles while trucks last 1 million for a reason
@@johnnygotti1568 Yeah trucks are utility and business owners like to keep them running with proper maintenance that most individual car owners don't bother with.
You would need millions of normal thermal cycles for any damage to occur. People get this idea from PS and Xbox consoles that die from turning them off. That is because of dust they overheated and ran in an overheated state for a long time damaging the silicon bumps. A restart allows it to cool and it breaks. The 1 thermal cycle makes its death obvious but it was not the killer.
@@SerratedPVP lol that’s being optimistic about the truck owners, but i’ll give you that
assuming reasonable maintenance, it comes down to heat cycles
@@johnnygotti1568 I just typed up a paragraph about how right you are and deleted it accidentally. Can't be bothered to type all that up again, but you are so right about heat cycles.
I've had 4 PCs in a row that went 7 years each before i replaced them. mostly due to software issues (windows fighting with drivers, causing various issues. Basically components becoming outdated is a major issue. Except in one case where the heat sink on the CPU got clogged with dust bunnies-back in the early pentium era where they had large attached heat sinks and a small fan-and the CPU fan melted off). I've only had to replace things like a graphics card once, and RAM 1-2 times. And i run my systems nearly 24/7, because i spend so much time on them and don't often sleep long so i want to be able to just get on and get back to doing stuff instead of waiting for it to boot up. Plus want to be able to hear notification sounds if anyone tries to contact me when i'm afk
what do you do ?
What is profession my guy?
Similar to me, 14+ hours (raised due to COVID) and no issues, recently been trying to turn it off when I sleep but I have gotten so used to the white noise I now have trouble sleeping with it off :(
However I can probably get used to it
that doesn't sound healthy, take care of yourself more, you owe it to yourself.
I also never turn the computer off. I just pause or close most of the programs and send the computer to idle. A modern PC only draws as much energy in idle as an old style light bulb.
I've generally kept my systems running 24/7 since I got my first 8088 machine. In the pre-2000 days, it was generally considered good practice and would prolong machine life, as power-cycling older components could introduce more wear-and-tear than just leaving it on all the time. After the early part of this century, however, this had pretty much ceased to be a concern and powering down and then on again as often as you wished wasn't a huge problem. But I left mine on all the time more or less out of habit. These days, now that I work from home exclusively, I'll often have jobs that run overnight anyway, so again my systems stay on all the time. I just have to remember to replace my HDDs from time to time. 😋
I run my desktop 24/7. It's way over 10 years old. I replaced the original hard drive in it a couple of years ago with an SSD. I built the computer myself and bought top of the line parts at the time. It still does everything I want it to. It can do a lot of things at once, such as download large files, play music, and write documents. I keep it on 24/7 because I do have things going on occasionally that need all night to accomplish. For example, copying a major amount of files from an older drive to a newer replacement takes over a day, because it involves terabytes of data. Also, I sometimes download files from Usenet and many times have days of downloads queued up. Additionally, I like to just go to the computer any time, day or night, and work without having to wait for the computer to boot up. I don't know if it still applies, but I had heard years ago that powering up a computer put heat stress on some parts, shortening their life. So I just let it run. It still looks brand new, as I clean it often.
I think it really depends on the build and how well you cool your rig.
Have my I7-7700 1080ti 11g on pretty much 24/7 running heavy VR loads/video/graphical rendering/recording pretty much all my games. Still benchmarks just under what it did 5 years ago.
Remember to undervolt it
Over my years, all the PCS that I leave on 24/7 has lasted for well over a decade and still going. The ones that turn off are usually replaced within 3-4 years if not sooner due to hardware issues.
I heard lots of stories from people experienced and it also happened to me as well: When the time comes, 9 out of 10 times, you shut down a working computer and it never boots again. That's usually how a computer dies due to age if not user's fault like liquid damage or dropping etc. If a PC living down the stretch and you don't know when it's gonna die (usually happens about 10+ years old PCs or 6+ years laptops) it's usually better to not shut down because you can't be sure if it's ever gonna boot again.
What about the operating system? The longer windows is turned on, the more strange bugs start to happen. A daily restart is really helpful for the OS.
Just disable the auto update. Only run it when you are going to do regular maintenance, which your pc will be turned off anyway. I run several windows VM and hypervisor, they are doing great for months before i updated their software or clean their case.
If you use basically any type of Linux instead of Windows, you won't have to worry about os stability.
I run Linux.
@@VDani16 I use arch and cannot confirm.
Chrome ?
So I've had my PC for 11 years now, and it's been running basically 24/7 for all this time, monitors included, apart from a week here or there when I was on vacation. Most everything still works. One thing failed - AIO, and it required replacing. Also I'd be nice to replace the fans too - they're still working just fine but have become slightly louder probably because the bearings are failing.
This is kind of a funny coincidence---I just had a case fan start making weird-ass squeaky/grindy noises this morning... luckily it's nothing mission-critical
I work in tech repair, and we had a customer come in this week with problems of apps not starting, apps freezing, and apps stalling. A reboot fixed all of these issues.
It turns out they had never powered off their laptop in the 3+ years they'd had it.
I don't know what, internally, causes something like this to happen. My gut says either the RAM or SSD index got corrupted from wear-and-tear, and rebooting rebuilt it enough for things to work again. I don't know, though.
I seriously do not understand why some people do not reboot their PC or phone when it acts up. Every time I ask friends or family members to reboot they think it is some offensive thing I am saying to them.
probably 3 years of driver, software and OS updates all being half installed at the same time.
After a month or something Windows just starting to act weird. Take updates on top of this and you have a recipe for a disaster. I kinda supporting mandatory updates and reboots in home versions because that way they can keep devices secure and make sure that customers reboots their PCs (and use Edge, lol)
@@vadnegru Forcing someones computer to reboot at any given time is always a bad idea since a lot of people have systems that are setup and rarely ever touched or checked again unless something goes wrong with it, it would be a massive anti-consumer move. Also, I can not count how many times I have had to deal with a broken system because Windows rebooted in the middle of the night and failed to update properly which resulted in a boot loop which eventually breaks something after going through the strain of the reboot process over and over again for hours on end. It's happened to me twice and at least a couple hundred computers I've fixed over the years. Not to mention the huge inconvenience it introduces to anyone that is not in their ideal fit of a common user.
@@TheChemizzle that kind of stuff was in early days. It have set its time to reboot outside of active working time and as far as i remember it already on in home versions and public backlash are not that big. Compare it to many of exploits and virus attacks due to unpached OS and we have some choice to make for developers.
In my experience, you don't really need to worry about turning off your monitors as your pc will automatically stop sending signal to them after a certain time of being idle, which will quickly trigger the monitor's low power mode with the display off. But if you have a program preventing it or disabled that setting, then yeah turn them off if you're not going to be using it for a long time
0:43 Even less than 3 months.
Back then I was an IT service technician, we often found motherboards and PC power supplies with dry capacitors.
The worst of all were companies like Dell and HP which blamed the damage on the user ("misuse") and did not honor the warranty, customers had to pay for the repair, often multiple times!
I have a Maxtor with over 9 years of uptime recorded in SMART, its a minor miracle it still works. I have it simply to see how long it lasts now, i don't use it for storing anything i car about. One thing I am curious about, I believe that for a HDD, the start up routine is the most stressful for it, when its suddenly dumped with electric and told to start doing things, so I wonder if in this regard, it is kinder on them to keep them constantly running, rather than lots of start ups on them?
I have a Maxtor-branded Seagate PATA HDD, a historic oddity from the time when Seagate had just bought out Maxtor. It's physically around 14 years old and has about 12 years of powered uptime with around 120 power cycles, it's still going strong.
Power cycles are by far the most stressful thing for a HDD. It has to deal with the sudden jolt in wattage when it turns on and the spindle motor has to spin up to speed, both of these things will wear out the mechanical components much more quickly than just having it powered on. HDDs face almost no wear once they're up and running, in fact, so long as they're not the kind to aggressively save power and power themselves down all the time.
Laptop HDDs are the most notorious examples of HDDs dying from power cycle wear. Even discounting the added shocks and vibrations that a mobile environment would place on them, the constant turning on-and-off of laptops means those HDDs have probably had to undergo far more power cycles than their desktop cousins.
If you want your HDDs to live a long life (and you don't mind the power bill), keep them powered on.
the key to extending your components' lifespan is maintaining a constant temperature.
the more the temperature fluctuates, the more problems you're gonna have. something something thermal expansion
Maybe I would suggest to look at this software wise. Imagine the clogged RAM when you leave your PC on too long. It got better the last 10 years ... but restarting will give you a small performance boost after long power on time :)
I think the system is cleaning the unused ram all the time, so unless you have a process which is leaking memory and never terminates this should be fine
Trash collection for RAM has gotten a lot better over the years but with the way it's handled now the impact is quite minimal.
I agree with this. After 35 days or so of on time my PC starts skipping randomly and lagging, especially with audio playing if I'm browsing through Chrome. A quick restart always fixes it, though!
I mean, your PC will eventually restart on its own whether you want it to or not. Windows update will make sure of that.
I dont see why software would be an issue tho. I was managing a few dozen servers once in my life, they all were running multiples windows VM and being on 99.999% of the time. The issues we had with the systems were very minimal.
I run a little radio station and I use an old Core 2 Duo PC to play all of our audio and music 24/7. I only replaced the PSU since it had few bloated capacitor and I clean it for once in a while. But with all of that it runs perfectly. It's common for radio stations that have PC's that run 24/7 because their automation system is vital to run and broadcast content.
Over 10 years ago I worked for the Los Angeles DWP at Scattergood Generating Station, which was a natural gas power plant. At this stations we had old units that had some computers added to them and a general purpose email computer. These computers were only turned off if they failed and needed repair, otherwise they were on all the time. With two of these computers the first thing to fail was the spinning platter Hard Disk Drives. Also our Instrument Shop had to occasionally clean out all the dirt and dust that accumulated in these computers, this was another time that they were turned off.
It's also worth pointing out that leaving your computer running can result in slow downs.
Especially if you have programs like web browsers running.
They just eat up all your system resources, and the entire system starts to chug.
Just shut down your computer when you're not using it. It's not hard, and if you have a fast SSD, it doesn't take long to boot up. Just do it.
Unless you stream music from your PC and want it available for remote access when you're away.
N0
You didn't explain why web browsers are bad if you leave them on.
Wtf do you mean eats up all your system resources? From doing what? How does it slowdown anything?
@@Tiyratania Yah, nothing a software update/system update wont fix anyways
@@Tiyratania the longer a web browser is left running, the more ram it will use.
And depending on exactly what processes it's running in the background, it can also take up huge portions of your CPUs workload. (But this is generally only a concern if you have a fairly low power CPU. Kind of a thing of the past for the most part these days.)
All of this means your computer becomes slow and unresponsive the longer you leave it running.
I am always paranoid my cooling loop - knowing that I put it together - is gonna spring a leak. I like leaving it on sometimes so I can remote in but it’s always in the back of my head!
The weirdest thing about capacitors is they were never talked about as cylindrical electricity containers in high school physics. It was always flat metallic rectangular plates facing each other, sometimes with a dielectric slab in between, that we had to find the capacitance of
Inside those cylinders there is a parallel plate capacitor, and by rolling them up, the space they would occupy if they were not rolled up is reduced. So the theory you were taught in high school is somewhat true.
They are still just that, it's just that the two plates are rolled up to take less space.
@@xavierutox Thank you. That makes a lot more sense
1:54 I legit thought that was a bayblade for a second.
One thing I don’t see a lot of people mentioning in here is the HEAT it pumps into your room. I was in a door room last semester and my roommate had his big full tower Corsair case with 3 exhausts fans running constantly with all his programs open. I’d come back at night sometimes and get hit with a warm humid wave of air walking in. Between the sleeping area room and the room we had our PCs in there was noticeable 3-4 degrees temp diff. So yeah if your room is cold in the winter just keep your pc running with a decent amount of programs open. It’ll heat the room right up lmao.
This is a amazing benefit for me living in Canada
I typically like my room a little warmer than the rest of my family which the PC takes care of (Might be because of my PC lol)
In my 20 years of computer experience, you're much more likely to have a problem when turning a computer on than if you just leave it on all the time. Most serious problems show themselves at startup.
Which is a good thing. Next to the fact that a simple reboot fixes 96% of all computer issues (seriously, this is the first thing EVERY technician will do) there's also an added benefit to troubleshooting. For example, most running PCs don't tell you if your SMART values are bad, but if you boot your BIOS will notify you that your drive is currently dying.
@@Finkelfunk Windows, at least Windows 10 above will spit up errors on logon if your HD has smart issues... I have seen this before... Maybe this is driver dependent, never looked into but, I have seen the Windows error showing "Your drive could be failing, it might be time to replace it" in our office machines.
@@TheCoolDave When my old harddrive died it never gave me an error unless I was restarting so I really don't know. I'm not sure if I was using Windows 10 though.
Especially if you're dealing with (at my work anyway) motor control cabinets, server racks, all the networking components, PLCs, or other industrial automation systems. It's always a good idea to never turn them off. Because when there's a power outage weird things happen for a few days.
All of our server networking devices, or servers are on a UPS.
That may be true but realistically you need to shut down sometime. What matters is how much damage was done in the meantime. Not the inevitable.
Oldest part in my current PC is 7 years, the harddrive. Still spins, still functions, but you can feel it's age creeping in, feels more like the motor that spins it will go before the plates though.
Yes, the mechanical components on HDDs often fail first once you pass a certain age. You should not turn off computers with spinning rust except for updates. The most significant wear and tear you can do is head parking and spin-ups. HDDs will seldom stop spinning by themselves, but they may not spin up again once you force them to spin down. Head parking is a consumer power-saving feature, not a lifespan feature, this is why enterprise drives don't have head parking or do so very seldomly, the cost of losing a drive exceeds that of the wasted energy.
@@XDSDDLord "the cost of losing a drive exceeds that of the wasted energy."
I disagree, running the PC for 20,000+ extra hours would exceed the cost of a HDD. (365 x 8 x 7) . If you don't agree with my estimate of 8 extra hours of uptime per day on average feel free to change it, but I promise you it'll go over the cost of this 2tb hdd.
@@duck74UK Your calculations seem to fail to account for the lost revenue cost of server downtime, wear and tear of rebuilding an array, the cost of a technician to come out and replace the drive, the potential cost of data loss or corruption, among a lot of other things.
@@XDSDDLord But it's not a server, its my personal computer?
@@duck74UK That is beside the point. The point is that because for an enterprise losing a drive costs so much more than running it, the technology there is geared towards 24/7/365 operations because that will minimize failures and maximize the life span and data integrity. This proves unequivocally that running a computer with HDDs 24/7 is better for components' health than shutting it down. The subject matter of this video is about component longevity, not the cost of operation. In that light, I commented to issue a correction to the insinuation made in the video that the continuous operation of your mechanical components is bad. Also, the amount of energy it takes to maintain the momentum of the plater when not actively running IO operations is relatively small, and considering you think losing a hard drive is no big deal, I am going to assume that you've never had a harddisk simply fail on you, and take all your data along with it. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, by all means.
My oldest hard drive has been running for like 10 years. Still working. Only has reallocated sectors as an issue. It's a 5400 RPM Seagate Momentum plus I suppose. Also all my laptops are still running on 5400 RPM Hard Drives. SSDs keep getting expensive in my country because importing them are banned
bruh what country would ban SSDs?
@@NoNameM9 Sri Lanka, coz we ain't got enough Dollars for literally everything. Honestly Windows laptop prices are skyrocketing here whereas Apple's M1 MacBook Air is literally at the same price as it was in 2020 at my local computer store.
My parents had a really old macintosh, I think it was from the very late 80's and they left it on every day, every night for almost 16 years before they finally got a windows 2000 pc
I once got Windows 95 to run for two weeks without a reboot. I felt like I should have got an award. They key was selecting software that had good memory management built into it. It's also the reason why still today I don't want to write code in a language that demands manual memory management like C/C++, it's a wonderful way to shoot yourself in the foot a variety of ways.
Techquickie: What If You Never Turn Off Your Computer?
Power Company: 👍👍👍
cmon, it's 2022, your average PC sips power at idle.
@@rawhide_kobayashi what if you're not the only one in your neighborhood with a non-turned-off computer?
@@savagepro9060 then they make however many extra few tens of watts per household
it's a microscopic amount compared to how much electricity everyone's regular appliances suck up
Back when I used an XP machine, it would start glitching if it remained on for too long. Usually 16 hours to 2 days. (The hardware was fine though, software was the issue.) Nowadays it's much more stable. I've left Windows 10 running for days on accident without problems, aside from the electricity bill.
On a somewhat related side note, my phone would lose the ability to connect to wifi if it is left on for a straight month, but a quick restart fixes it every time.
I had a similar expereicne with XP but since window 7 I've never regularly turned off my computer and it goes months if not years with only update restarts inturupting it, and I have never seen a problem with either longevity or performance.
I had the same problem on AMD AM2 platform. Had 4GB of ram and a Athlon 3600+ 2 core. It had the same issue on Windows 7! Once held at more then 2 days, the morning i step infront of a computer, the performance was quite worse.
I had an Asus laptop with windows 7 on it back in 2010/2011 or so, I used that for up to about 2014 or so, I had it on once for up to almost 19 days solid once. In context to having a computer that I regularly used, I never broke that record, computers I infrequently used, I broke that easily. For those wondering, I set up laptops on hibernation mode when I closed the lids. Unfortunately, I can't set up hibernation mode on one of my laptops right now because the option is unavailable to do so.
the only time i ever turn off my pc is when servicing components or more commonly when i run into stability issues
My current pc had a similar problem but it was worse it only took a few hours before everything crashed but it magically went away it also has another problem where it just gets slow but its not as bad because it take a long time before it gets too slow.
I usually just put my pc to sleep when I'm away, and do a full power cycle every week or so. I feel like that's pretty optimal for the lifespan without having to spend any time on it.
I've built my own computers for the last 19 years, I never shut them down outside of doing maintenance, and I have never had any of them die on me.
I'm also a power gamer, so I overclock, optimize and do all sorts of unintended things to my rigs.
I sold or gifted all of them away when I upgraded to something better, and I know for a fact that most of them are still working. :D
Why do you not turn them off though? Do you not pay electricity?
@@divineone1 Downloading, updating, compiling - and the whole thing consumes like 50w on idle...
It used to be more important when computers and the internet were slower (imagine booting for a solid 3 minutes and downloading a 700mb movie for the better part of a day XD ), but it's more force of habit now. I'm old like that... XD
One thing I didn't her you mention is Sleep mode. It's enabled on my desktop and powers down the system when it hasn't been used in a certain amount of time, and will quickly resume if the keyboard or mouse is touched. It also allows t he middle of the night automatic updates. The display also goes into sleep mode and will reawaken when it receives a signal from the computer. My understanding is that minimal power is required during this time. I would think this extends the life of the computer as well without having to completely shut it off.
Would love to hear the opposing side, are there any downsides to turning your computer off every night? Or there are none?
Turning your computer off an on every night causes no harm, it helps windows clear cached data etc. The only strain caused by turning off and on your computer is an HDD spinning up and down, because that's when they endure the most wear
They covered that towards the end, they said it does no harm then moved on.
@@jatoxo Actually, shutting it off doesn't completely reset the system, restarting it does. When restarting, you are forcing the system to boot up fresh new files from the hard drive. When shutting it off, sometimes it leaves some files inside RAM to boot it up more quickly or just not get bothered with loading in some stuff. I think LTT themselves did this analysis? Not really sure.
@@jatoxo AFAIK all hard drives have power managment in them so they will spin down when not in use. How long they need to be unused for the spin down to happen varies by model. So unless your HDD has your OS/some other continuously running software it will spin down and up during normal use too.
@@dduleyt You are talking about "fast startup" which saves the state of the windows kernel **on the disk**. It should still help with most of the Windows things that hog your computer if you leave it running for an eternity
You dont have to keep it running for remote access, you can use wake on lan if it supports it
You need a PhD in port forwarding ...
You also need a miracle so that instructions for turning on port forwarding for your "specific router" are actually on planet earth -instead of Andromeda Galaxy.
I have two generic desktops (running Linux).
They have been powered on almost continuously for 12 and 14 years.
That's insane and very cool
(linux)
@` *ignore them*
Why?? I know that's fine for Linux but restarting for big system updates is still a good idea. Doing a big update and not restarting can cause serious stability issues (especially if you get an nVidia driver update)
@@ArdgalAlkeides "almost continuously" implies that they reboot their system like once a week or so.
Fun video. Liquid electrolyte caps fail if left un-powered for a long time. Hard drives spin down, if not in use, even if your computer is left on. If you have a desktop with a cmos battery leave it plugged in so the clock is not using up the battery, causing an early replacement. With the price of electricity, I turn off, but leave them plugged in, any computer that is not acting as a server. Windows 10 makes it a pain because it likes to update after hours but it saves money.
My computer and monitor both been runnin' for 6 years straight with only breaks to move. Idk guys, she still runs smooth. Had a fan go out only recently.
What about the expanding and contracting of parts with the heat when you turn off and on your computer? If its on all the time that does not happen since the computer is always warm
ive left my pc on for about 8 years nonstop, never had a problem, you should see how many hours my original 2tb hard drive from when i was 14 has, its insane how many hrs it has and still perfectly good
While I do turn off my gaming rig when not using it, I never turn off my media PC... cuz I'm always using it. Forced windows updates are pretty much the only time it ever sees a restart too.
Its why l switched mine to linux. I have only turned it off to add or replace stuff really
@@micobugija6284 I tried Linux... worst experience of my life. Nothing worked, and when it did, it was buggy as hell. Getting Linux to work correctly is like having a full time job... really not worth it.
Media PC? Do you mind if I ask what are you doing with it just out of curiosity?
@@turgsh01 depends on what you want it to do really.
@@delofon mostly plex, running backup services, and similar
I just upgraded my previous computer (a Shuttle XPC with an i7) after 7.5 years, which I left on for about 7 years worth of that time. My SSD was the first thing to expire- too many write cycles, catastrophic failure. After replacing that SSD with another, that computer lives on as the kids' homeschool classroom computer. I make sure to set my computers to sleep overnight now, which has also been saving a surprising amount of power.
Perfectly valid for computers running old, almost extinct HDD's, now with SSD's without moving parts and increased malware and hacking activities, the safest way to protect your computers is to shutdown it every single time you are getting away from it.
5 years for HDD? Woopsies, my "youngest" one is around7 years now of continuous use 😅
I've got some in my server that are 20 years old, still going strong but I have had others die after only a few years.
@@rossharper1983 The ones I lost along the previous 10/12 years were ALL Seagate drives of 500GB and up. They ALL failed my in less than 2 years, no exceptions
@@MarcioHuser I currently have 67tb in my server. Over the 20+ years I've lost drives from all brands but within the last 5 or so years I have to say Toshiba's have been the most reliable. Currently using a suite of Toshiba 8tb drives.
Sadly my old phenom died 2 years back, so i had to get a new-old-stock ryzen to replace it with, what a wast. 6 month later my old gpu died also. What a sad year.
But the.psu is still working
@@matsv201 I mean it was a phenom, time to upgrade anyway lol
Reminds me of how, when I was younger, I thought restarting your computer meant factory resetting it. Jesus I was dumb lol
You end up with a nice surprise when the electricity bill comes through the post
Not really here in texas electricity is cheap
If your computer used 100w on average and was powered on for every hour of an entire year, at the average rate of elecricity it would cost you less than $100 per year in electricity.
@@aaronho4242 I'm extremely jealous. UK caps were raised; my bill is £700 more a year now...
I'm using Diskeeper 18 to eliminate unnecessary read/write access using idle RAM. The results are quite impressive and reduce wear and tear on any sort of HDD/SSD. Over a two year period on a M.2 SSD: Read I/Os Eliminated 46% Write I/Os Eliminated 45%.
Fans are made to be replaced, and they're fairly easy to replace. I've replaced a few fans on various computers over the years. I've also replaced the HD on a couple machines, although I was able to keep an old HD running years after it failed the SMART test. Although I mainly leave my computer running overnight because it takes a while to start up.
Anything that is made to be replaced isn't made with the customer in mind
I have my case fans running for over 5 years, they are cooler master fans, that costed 15$ each... Before that i would change my fans every 2 years after they fail, and also had to listen to horrible noise
I havent turned any of my computers off since 2001
Read my name
@@Subbefore-di7eo nah
It literally takes less than 5 seconds to boot. Why do people not shut down their PCs unless there's a task that requires completion running?
Must be lazy people. There is really no reason not to. I only let my PC sleep if I know I'll be back in an hour or two but if I'm away for longer - shutting it off. It's mental.
lmao imagine leaving your pc on while not using it. Prolly kids that don't pay for their power bills.
I’d bet you take cold showers and adhere to “if it’s yellow let it mellow” too.
if the monitor is off and it's idling it would only be a few watts.
@@jacobc5747 yeah I understand it uses very little power idling, I just don't want my aio pump to die from too many on hours.
@@jacobkorban476 well yeah me neither. That's a different case completely than "kids that don't pay the power bill" tho
Yess!! Monitor lifespan video please! Also include CRTs!
As for this video, awesome, I love stuff like this- lifespan!!
This show was excellent. I have a Dell Inspiron, an all-in-one microcomputer. I shut it down when not in use for long periods of time with Microsoft Windows 10 Professional. I never press the power switch without selecting the shut down selection in the software. It is nice to learn something else about hardware just as I am learning more about software.
My other problem is our rented house were sensitive to thunder and trip suddenly. So yeah, on and off is a daily thing.
Plus the need to save the bill is kinda priority too. I'm still saving for good ups as I don't has one.
I pray that my setup lasts longer than a decade. Man, making money grow on trees is hard!
I remember "back in the day," one of the claims made was the heating and cooling cycles could cause the solder to crack. Handling PCB's everyday at work the solder on modern boards is much better (lead free sucks, flows like crap) but I really don't see that as much of this happening today. But I still remember the church I went to keeping their Packard Bell on all the time.
I've had my desktop PC running 24/7 for 8 years continously and it's still working great, I clean the insides out every 1 to 2 years and redo the thermal paste when I clean it out, it doesn't get that dusty, it still works like it did when it was new
@Windows 98 to be 100% honest I've only had 1, and that was 3 to 4 years ago, other then that, surprisingly no
Temperature fluctuations caused by powering your pc off and on daily causes expansion and contraction of components that will decrease their lifespan. An old electronics engineer explained this to me and it seems to hold true throughout the 20 plus years of my professional experience. Leave it on and perform reboots once a week to keep the OS updated and you'll have less issues all around.
I have a dual opteron from 2012 and is still going strong! I use it to write my code. Have an old silver stone 1500w silver psu. Still rockin and rollin!
Still using the same PC that I built over 10 years ago. The only thing that started dying was the stock fans that came with the case. Sleeve bearing fans will usually make an audible grinding noise at cold boot, and that's a good indicator that they're on their way out. Every other pivotal component, even HDDs are still operating as normal.
I have an i7-3770K on an Asus Sabertooth Z77 board I built in 2012. I keep in on 24-7-365. I do put it to sleep when I leave it. It has been an excellent setup. I also have 2 Asus 24'" monitors on it, and they are still working as advertised. The only problems I have had are some sticks of RAM have gone bad and sometimes the RAM may have connection issues. After uninstalling the loose RAM and reinstalling it, it will work again.
One of my friends swear keeping his laptop on 24/7 is what makes it last so long.
Most regular people I know shut down their computers after they use it. And with modern OS's, it's absolutely not necessary. You can just leave it and it'll go to sleep it hibernation.
And according to my friend, if you don't use your laptop for a couple weeks or so, it gets too cold, too humid, things start growing in there, etc. And eventually something fails.
But if you keep it on, it'll go to sleep, and it'll keep it slightly warm so laptop stays safe.
I'd the battery is about to die, laptop will go to hibernation, so battery is safe too.
Since many many windows versions ago when you click on shut down it doesn't actually shut down your computer... can actually just goes into a hybrid sleep mode. The only way to actually shut it down in the sense of removing power from all the components on the board is to do a restart or pull the power plug. If you install a program and it tells you need to restart the computer and you decide to do a full shutdown and then press the power button to turn it back on the program won't work properly because the computer didn't actually shut down... It just went into that hybrid sleep mode.
I have 2 machines I use on the regular. For reasons I won't go into, one is a laptop that almost never gets turned off, and the other is a desktop that I turn off every night.
The desktop was having more issues than the laptop, even though everything inside it specced better than the laptop. It runs more complex software, so I chalked it up to that, until I realized that while I leave the laptop on, I generally restart it almost every day just to cycle it through a total reboot. Since I only turn on the Desktop when I sit down to use it, I would turn it on, then "shutdown" when I was done. Without realizing it, I had been letting the thing go weeks and weeks at a a time without ever actually clearing the caches, and resetting the states and bringing it back through the boot process.
This is the opposite of how computers used to be, so even though I had learned that Win 7, 8, and 10 wanted you to restart, rather than shut down, to reboot, I just let the habit slip my mind on the "big machine."
(Note, now I usually shut down while holding shift, which does a full shutdown. I could also turn off "Fast Startup" which is the feature that holds onto your cached data and such, keeping you in a dirty computing state through shutdowns.)
During a west-aussie summer, my house gets to an ambient temp of 35-40C, my computer has pretty much been running 24/7 since the day I built it in 2012, it's been through a couple of power supplies in that time, but those were cheap ones.
In terms of PC fans, I only have 1 fan that is a once every year or 2 problem, it's a 240mm fan that came with the case, and for that one, I just get the good ol' sewing machine oil out, put a drop into the oil-well underneath the sticker and rubber cap, and hey presto, the fan is good for another year or 2.
My monitors pretty much stay on 24/7 too, I get a good 6yrs out of those and I only replace them because they are long out of warranty, but still going strong.
Not saying the stuff you have said in the video isn't valid, it's just "horses for courses".
I keep mine on over night and if I'm at home during the day too, when there has been a lot of rain. Keeps the moister/humidity in the air out of the computer. This is especially important if you have issues with dust. I've had a power supply blow up because of extreme humidity from rain and dust in the power supply. Luckily it didn't take anything out, when it blew.
Also we see lots of parts in machinery go kaboom in factories because of the exact same reason. Especially if the machine has been standing a few days. Around here some of the factories don't clean thier machines in side at all till something goes wrong, or don't clean it regularly enough. I've had times where I've had to dig out fans with a skrewdriver. Add that with humidity from hot day after the rains or a hot rainy day and the fun begins.
I remember a story that before the old main post office in Chicago closed they found a Windows NT server in a small office that was drywalled off. It had been running for 11 years.
always powered on with sleep mode active is the way to go. best of both worlds: draws very little power and preserves components, and can start back up in an instant even via network.
ran my old rig for 8-9 years 24-7 no turn off. z77 d3h, 4570k, 32gb ram, r9 270x. i don't use it anymore just cause it's obsolete but i bet it would run even 10+ years easily
All my home entertainment and communication is from my desktop. Games, work, video chatting, movies and tv, etc. All my utilities and internet are included in my rent as well. Given all this my computer has about a 90% up time really only shutting it off if I'm going to be away from home more then a day. Built this current one around February of 2021 and everything is still running smooth. In the past most of my computer hardware issues happened when I turned on the computer so I eventually got sort of paranoid and began a habit of only shutting off my screen when not in use.
@ltt: when I was a kid at school the had an exercise bike hooked up to a light bulb switch board that had a power output reader. They showed us what it was like to produce xyz amounts of power by switching on the light bulbs while you rode it, and it was really eye opening to see what it would be like to run a 400 watt cpu. maybe you should do a video like that to make the audience appreciate power and how far we have come.. and what might be plausible in the future.
I’ve been leaving my computer on 24/7 for the past like two or three years to run some stuff to get me some passive income, I only turn it off when something isn’t working right or it crashes (then of course, it’ll force itself to update)
I’ve always had at least one of my computers on for the last 30 years or more and always have had separate servers for different tasks. One for torrenting, one for streaming and one for file serving has been my setup for a decade, until now that I’m trying using only one for those tasks. I’m still not convinced about it but at least I’m saving power and generating less heat as this spring we’re having never higher temperatures than ever before. In fact my servers are my decommissioned workstations, so they are usually heavily used before turning them into servers. With proper maintenance, you can extend their life well beyond the ten year mark.
@paco Have you found a speed/performance difference since adding your torrenting to other function computer? I used to torrent only to a laptop and the speed was reduced by gazillions. Now the Laptop is gone and I don't know where to get torrents from.
Core i7 3820k, built in 2012, been off for less than 100 hrs since then. It's done some mining and gone through several video cards and many hard drives. I still game on on it (definitely not at 4k though.) Video is spot on.
I remember this type of discussion happening during the 286 days.
Ive left my Mac pro towers running 24/7 for years. I still use my early 2009 Mac pro tower as a daily user and it's been on 24/7 except power outages and storms, I replace the drive about every 18-24 months.
What I never liked is the idea of shutting them down every day, cooling off, turning back on and getting warm, better to have it the same temp 24/7 than cycling up and down.
Ive had my towers running 24/7 and never had a problem with any of them or even one drive failure, I always bought used Mac towers and put in a new WD caviar black drive.
But since last month I switched my daily user over to a home built box running linux as the Mac OS has become stagnant and older Macs are being deliberately obsoleted by the updated software no longer being ABLE to be installed at all, they have it locked up now to where you can ONLY download and install the updated OSX thru the apple store and it refuses to even download if your Mac doesnt meet it's minimum date requirement.
So I could buy a newer than 2009 Mac and pay $600-$900 for it, and again, after the next OSX update it wont run on the 2012-2015 or whatever I might get that's newer. They already made it so you couldnt update to the next update without replacing your GC to a "metal capable card"
So I'm pretty done with Apple/Mac in favor of linux mint and I leave the thing running 24/7, only turning off the monitor at night. Should mention I always had my towers on a metal rack shelf in the basement, it's cooler and cleaner there and the internal temps I show right now are 86, 82 and 86F - so about 15 degrees warmer than the basement
My kids machines (2units) are already 11 yrs old. Both still having that AMD AM3 cpu. Within those years the only time my kids turn off their machines is when we have power outages. With power supplies I had them replaced 1 time each and their HDDs around hitting its 9th year as games need more storage. Fans about 2x and RAM upgrades. Monitors, I had to replace them 4x already. Main issue, burn-ins and dead capacitors.
Don’t forget about the liquid cooler pumps, curious on your take of life of those.
I work at home and whatever hours are convenient for me, so I leave my computer on all the time. I only turn it off when I will be away for at least a day.
My PC is set to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity.
I also have it set to “wake on pattern match”
That gives me the best of both worlds - I save electricity when the PC isn’t needed but it will wake up automatically if I need to log in remotely or access a shared drive from another machine on my network.
Haven't turned off any computer I've owned aside from maintenance, in 20 years. They've all been fine. Saved myself 4:45.
The only failure I've had since 2008 was a cheap power supply, I put a new one in and that computer still works today as a media pc in my living room.
Should have discussed the impact of sleep vs hibernate vs completely off
getting that dust off those DDR2 OCZ Dimms. Oh nostalgia~
I have a system with an i7 4790k, and at longest I had it on for over 500 days, and routinely kept it going for over 200 days. It still works fine to this day and the mobo caps and VRMs are all still going quite well.
My company do investigations to check failures occur in the business network and on the machines itself. They report that 75% of SW failures hitting the IT came from not restarting windows. These are mainly Lenovo and HP notebooks with on board graphics and business operated windows 10. recommendation is to restart every 48h. Some machines are process intense simulation workstations which can’t be turned off for maybe weeks. It sometimes occurs that they give up during several days of heavy workload. I know you are talking about hardware here. But that’s also something to consider.