Shutdown, Standby, or Hibernate?I get this question a lot: Should I leave the computer on or should I shut it down at night? There's a wide variety of responses you might get to that question and usually if you have two or more IT people nearby an argument will start. The general schools of thought tend to flow like this: Turn it off. You're wasting electricity all night long and the mechanical parts of the computer are still spinning and whirring full bore even when nobody is at the keyboard. Tough to argue with these facts. Reasons against? When metal and plastic heat up and cool down, they expand and contract. Therefore, when you turn on a computer that has been off all night, it quickly warms up to operating temperatures. This does have a significant effect on the physical materials of the computer's motherboard, heatsinks, and various other parts. Does this mean the life of the unit is lessened? There's no real reason to think so. Just about all computer designs allow for an amount of variation with regard to this natural effect. Remember, this isn't limited to computers, anything mechanical will expand or contract if it gets hot and there will be some warping that occurs, even if the naked eye can't see it. Put it in standby. You're saving some electricity with the components in low power mode and the monitor mostly off. The fans generally keep moving but the other mechanical parts spin down and the temperature is kept fairly constant. Downside here are that machines can occasionally not wake from standby mode due to crashing or losing track of input like the keyboard and mouse. Shutting it off in this state is almost as bad as pulling the plug while it is on. This is only a minor risk in practice unless your machine has a history of having this problem. Let the unit hibernate. Not everyone has this option, you need support from both the operating system and from the hardware to accomplish it. Basically the computer's active state is saved to a file on the hard drive and then the entire thing is powered down. When powered back up, instead of booting normally, it reads from this file and restores things back to where they were. It is generally faster than a cold boot in most cases. Downside here is usually your devices. USB and Firewire drives, wireless connections, or other components can sometimes respond badly to being cut off from power like this and then have the computer attempt to talk to them as if nothing happened a day later when you turn it on again. The hotplug nature of FireWire and USB generally overcomes this but not all devices are created equal so you may run into problems with some device and motherboard combinations. Also, if you hibernate for months on end every week, remember that computers tend to crash more if they don't get restarted once in a while. In the end it is down to personal preference and usage patterns. I never turn my computer off but I am always downloading something or doing something useful with the computer when I can't be directly in front of it. Those of us who don't use it everyday should just turn it off. Hibernation may need some experimenting on your part to see how your setup reacts to it. Just remember to restart now and then. All Articles |
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