Should You Power Off Your PC At Night?

The title of this article may be a very simple question but has a different answer depending on what part of the computer you’re talking about.

If the hardware is a desktop computer box, the answer is NO.

The two things that will wreck a desktop PC faster than anything else are hard drives that “mis-spin” and dirty fans.

If you take a standard 7200 RPM hard drive, turn it on and never turn it off, odds are very good it will last seven years. This is because the drive is kept spinning at all times (unless you have your Power Settings set to spin the drive down, which is just as bad as turning it off), meaning the gear is kept moving. You can consider the life span of a hard drive similar to that of a fluorescent light bulb. It is well known that turning a fluorescent light off is bad concerning its life span because every time you turn it on, the ballast needs to fire the gas in the tube in order for it to fire and illuminate. The less you fire the ballast, the longer the light bulb lasts. With hard drives, a similar principle applies. Keep the drive spinning and it requires the absolute least effort for it to keep operating, and therefore lasts longer because it doesn’t have to exert extra power to start from a dead stop.

For those of you that have been using computers a long time, I can guarantee that when you had a hard drive fail on you, it was during startup and not while you were in the middle of doing something.

Case fans and CPU fans, while relatively cheap parts, can kill your PC in short order. They will get dirty no matter how much effort you put into cleaning them. If you keep the fans spinning, the principle is exactly the same as why you keep a hard drive spinning. When spinning, it requires the least effort to keep operating and does not have to exert extra power to start from a dead stop.

If the hardware is a laptop, the answer is YES.

A laptop uses a hard drive factor one inch smaller (2.5-inch) than a desktop hard drive (3.5-inch). Where the difference lies is that a 3.5-inch drive is typically 7200rpm while a laptop drive is 5200rpm. If you ever wondered why laptop drives have slower access times, it’s because of the lower RPM.

Contrary to a desktop, you do want to power a laptop off when not in use. The reason? To avoid excessive heat. Heat above anything else will kill a laptop in short order. The compact chassis never has an easy time expelling heat from it, so you want to keep it as a cool as possible. The best way to do this is obviously to turn the laptop off when not in use – even if you’re using an external monitor.

If the hardware is an LCD monitor, the answer is YES.

The first question most people would ask is, “My monitor hardly emits any heat at all, nor does it have any moving parts, so why would I need to turn it off?”

The answer here is simple: You turn a monitor off to save the backlight.

LCD monitors on average last about 5 years, but you can eke out 7 to 10 simply by turning them off when not in use. The #1 reason why an LCD monitor fails is because the backlight quits working. When that happens it makes the monitor unusable.

Fortunately it’s very easy to have the monitor turn off on your behalf. Simply set your power-saver settings to turn the monitor off after 30 to 60 minutes of idle time. When the time mark is hit, the power light on your monitor should turn yellow (instead of the normal green or blue), and the backlight is turned off completely. Technically your monitor is not completely powered off, but what you want to save (the backlight) is turned off, and that’s fine.

Will these tips change in the future?

As a matter of fact they will.

In about one to two year’s time, many of us (maybe you included) will be switching from traditional platter-based hard drives to SSD (Solid State Disk). SSDs do not have any moving parts whatsoever, but they do emit a lot of heat. With an SSD, you don’t leave it on all the time and do turn it off when not in use. Yes, this is the exact opposite advice compared to a platter-based hard drive, but it’s absolutely true.

Concerning the backlight of a monitor, there are several on the market already that use an LED backlight instead of an incandescent bulb array. LED like SSD is a solid-state design and is up to 70% more efficient than incandescent is. As such, there really won’t be a need to shut off monitors that use an LED backlight setup. You can if you want to, but it really doesn’t make the bulb(s) last any longer.