IT Professionals

Justifying The 24 Hour PC

Posted by on Jan 29, 2008 | 16 Comments

Everyday, I hear plenty of arguments against keeping a PC on all day unless it is in immediate use. This power saving mindset has become so common in fact, that entire businesses have been built up around it. Zonbu, comes to mind, among others.

But this argument of using spare PC cycles to work with some distributed computing project for mapping out environmental modeling is a tough sell as far as I am concerned. That said, I would agree that keeping a PC on all the time is generally wasteful and completely unnecessary except in very rare cases. And I do think that there are some distributed computing projects that would make it worthwhile to donate those spare cycles, thus keeping the PC on 24/7 in those caes. However mapping possible environmental changes with a power-chugging PC is simply not one if them in my mind.

Am I all wet here? Can you share circumstances that might better justify leaving your PC on all day? Post some thoughts to the comments, I am all ears.

  • http://www.zenpcservices.com zenfool

    Leaving a pc on 24/7 is something a lot of geeks do. I used to until I became a little more conscience of the world around me. I try to standby as often as possible when I can along with just plain shutting down the PC when it’s not going to be in use for a while.

    When I did have a server back in my geek hay days I used to run a distributed computing app such as Africa@home and Folding@home to justify it being on 24/7.

    Here’s a good list of distributed computing projects

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

  • NewJohnny

    An idle pc uses considerably less power than a “processing” pc. Hard drives will use 4 times as much power and cpus will use up to 3 times more. If you want to save energy, spend the time configuring the power management options and make sure they work.

  • Johan Berrum

    If it’s in an environment where heating is necessary it makes no real difference if the computer stays on or not, the energy a computer uses all converts to heat in the end anyway, and it makes no difference whatsoever if the computers or the radiators produce the heat needed to warm up the office.

    Where i live i keep the computers on 24/7 at winter spring and fall, and turn them off when i can on summer.

  • Mike Nelson

    Here is a thought. I don’t care how good of defenses you have, if you give some hacker enough time to break into your computer, he can do it. I recommend to all my customers to please turn off the computer at night. Plus, especially with spring coming, thunder storms may be frequent in your area. I don’t know about your area, but locally here in Kansas, our electric company leaves a lot to be desired. Electrical spikes and brown outs are common. Don’t expect surge protectors to do the job, very few really do.

  • http://www.calcresult.com Mike

    Actually, turning appliances off at night (of any kind) that have been running all day makes no difference to CO2 emissions- Power Stations need to be sized for peak capacity, and are not capable of reacting on an hour-by-hour basis, so they still have to ‘idle’ through the night. Not sure about the US, but in the UK electricity is half-price overnight as a result.

  • Dave

    I leave my pc on all the time and run Folding at home and some remote access software. Being able to remote into my machine and pull some info out is great.
    Folding at home is a protein folding app and has direct benefits to human health. The results ARE NOT used by private enterprise, but for the public good. This is clearly stated in their FAQ. Other DC projects like United Devices keep the benefits of the pool, and even use your pc for distributed bandwidth tests. I have been doing dc stuff for years, and Folding at home is one of the better ones when it comes to altruism.

  • Wayne

    Yeah, sure, leaving your pc on 24/7 is a great idea if you want to be a naive participant in the great spam-bot criminal empire

  • Jason

    The only good thing about leaving them on all the time in a business environment and from a technical perspective is that you can schedule your updating and scans to run then without interfering with the user during the day. Also, if you do maintenance after hours, you don’t have to worry about going around and making sure the machines are off.

    Mostly, I guess it is personal preference and what fits your organization.

  • DaveN

    I leave my office PC running to facilitate remote access. I’m not aware of any simple ways to wake a PC from a power saving state remotely. However, for my home PC, I use the Sleep function in Vista. That saves most of the power, and the PC wakes in about the amount of time it takes for the monitors to be ready – 2 or 3 seconds.

  • Al Huevon

    in a business situation with over 2000 workstations, i keep my network mgmnt apps on my office computer then at a client computer I can remote in to the office pc and manange from there. why not a laptop? less to carry, nothing to charge. dont have to mess with Ip settings. There is no reason not to leave a pc on 24/7. Being green is stupid, global warming or climate change is a myth, dont be a sheep.

  • Dennis

    Around areas with high humidity and little insulation in offices and constant weather changes causes PC’s to sweat inside. In this Area I have always recommended that they leave the PC’s on especially when they turn off the central units. This has kept the PC’s dry and less hardware problems from occuring.

  • Chris Elrod

    I usually recommend ny customers to leave them on and set the power options to turn monitor off after 30 minutes and hard drives after 2 hours. A good analogy for this would be to take two new identical cars and park them in a parking lot with a gas tanker truck behind them. Keep them full of gas. Crank them both and leave one running all the time. The second have it turned off and wait until completely cool and then crank it back. Which car will tear up first? Answer: The one that is repeatedly going from hot to cold and cranked often. On a computer, it gets hot when in use. If turned off after using it the parts go from extreme hot to extreme cold which can cause condensation and more wear and tear on the parts. The one that is left on will gradually drop from extreme hot to a smooth idle temp. I guess it’s a give or take situation. Yes, it can be more harmful to the environment but on the other hand can be harmful to your pockets when parts start going bad and you have to pay to have them replaced. I have tested this theory over several years and have proven time over time that those that turn their PC’s off risk more chances of data loss and parts going bad versus those that leave them on with the proper power options in place.

  • Frank Pierz

    I’m from the school of “leave it on”. Most environmental tolerances are implemented in the PC design while it’s “on”. Also, most companies adjust their environmental conditions for when the building is empty. Over time, this causes humidity to factor into a pc’s lifetime. Think about it, what would your PC ask for if it could? …a constant temperature. Let’s not discount the power supply’s lifecycle either. When do you lose powers supplies? …At start up. I’ve lost a significant number of less power supplies, as well as hardware adopting the “keep it on” notion. You just have to set the HD to stop spinning after a certain amount of time, and you’re good to go. For those who shut off, when the heck do you find time to push out software and updates if the machine is off?

  • http://www.zrinko.com Zrinko Modrusan

    It seems that this debate will never end. In my environment-ignorant days, I just left all my PCs on because it was easy and cheap. Also, PCs were much more expensive, and on-off cycles do shorten the expected life cycle (not sure if the difference is measurable and meaningful in the real world, but that is different issue). Now, I only leave my main PC on as it is used for backing up all other PCs to it, music/video streaming to my TV, as well as for remotely accessing data on it. In my office which is not heated, the heating factor comes as an added bonus. As I have not found a way put it in sleep, and have it wake up when needed, it is always on. At work, all workstations are on 24/7 mostly for maintenance reasons: updates, virus scans, backups, etc. If anyone has a graceful way of doing this while saving energy, I am all for it…

  • Karl

    My thoughts on this things like this is if your wanting to learn on how to make a database through applications like Oracle 10g express or Oracle 11i for example where you are dealing with large amounts of data and learning on who to create forms, data entry, reports, Input forms. Where you can manipulate the information through the database. For the typical end user or programmer like myself. I usually keep the computer closed at night until I need to turn it on the next day or when I get home after work. Leaving it on over night for regular users. I don’t think you need to leave it on over night. Unlessyour working on heavy amounts of data or working on an application that requires the computer to be left running over night to compile the code over night. Sometimes if you have multiple computers running and having it like a beowulf set up where you can do a load balancing on the work load to cut the time in half. Then fine. But that is me over here.

    Karl

  • b79

    Saving power is definitely a huge deal, I really think the one company that has got great potential for green computing is Userful with their software that can turn any single existing PC box into 10 workstations. An amazing way to save power overall and cut down co2 emissions. Feel free to check out more on this: http://www.userful.com.