Why You Should NOT Shut Down Your PC

Porphyrogenitus

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If your time is worth more than $1.91/hr you're losing money shutting down your PC each night

Back in the stone ages I remember reading about this in PC Magazine. Since time is money, wasting time each day switching tasks and restarting applications is costing you hundreds or thousands a year. It's even more true today, with reduced power consumption and laptop/tablets being more commonplace. Run the numbers for yourself, all you need is a little data:

C[SUB]kWh [/SUB]= Cost / kilowatt hour. Check your bill. In my case its $.127/kWh, yours is similar.
P[SUB]kWatts[/SUB] = Hourly power consumption in kilowatts. We're not counting monitors: these are easy to turn off. Most PC power supplies are .6kw's, but you aren't capping them out 24/7. My power supply is 1kw but everything isn't running at 100% when you're away at night unless you just like running infinite loops while you sleep. .350 is a safe estimate for me, probably .250-.3 for average users.
T[SUB]AFK[/SUB] = Hours away from keyboard between the time you stop working and when you come back to the office. For me, 12.

H[SUB]End[/SUB] = Hours you spend saving, closing programs, "getting ready to shut down tonight" etc. Could do minutes but lets not complicate things. I'll say .1.
H[SUB]Start[/SUB] = Hours it takes you to get restarted every day. Here is where it adds up:

  • Unless you have a solid state drive you're looking at 3-5 minutes for a full boot (BIOS, windows loading, logging in, and waiting for all your junk to start up).
  • You have to remember where you were, and manually re-open each program and the files within it (also carries a small risk of data loss).
  • Open cloud services, log in, etc.
  • "Checking" things like email, Skype, BHW, PayPal, etc. that you normally have open all day. Each usually requires a login.
​
You're spending a serious amount of time here. I'll say .18 hours here for myself, but that is probably far too low.

Now crunch the numbers:

C[SUB]kWh[/SUB]*P[SUB]kWatts[/SUB] * T[SUB]AFK[/SUB] = Total cost of running your PC all night

C[SUB]kWh[/SUB]*P[SUB]kWatts[/SUB] * T[SUB]AFK [/SUB]/ (H[SUB]End + [/SUB]H[SUB]Start[/SUB]) = Hourly earning rate where its no longer worth it to shut down.

$.127 * .350 * 12/ (.1 + .18) = $1.91/hr

Of course these numbers are further compounded if you have employees. Remember this next time the wife gets mad for 'wasting money':)
 
:) I never shut down my laptop just because I have alot of applications open and I hate to reopen all of them so yeah my laptop is always running and BTW I have SSD on my computers and the problem for me is not the boot time its that I dont always remember all the task I had open :)
 
mine just doesn't do the shutdown thing too well, sometimes It can take a bit to get going again, so I rarely turn it off. I know I should get a replacement but it's just such a hassle.
 
Mine is running 24/7 unless there is an update that needs a reboot.
 
Never shut my laptop down unless as mentioned above, for updates, and I tend to let them stack up for weeks then do them all at once.
 
I don't think saving electricity is why people shut it down, but then again, people are crazy. Normally, I'd only shut mine down to give my hardware a break.

Lets not forget the large number of foreign freelancers on here who work on oDesk for less than $1.91/hour.
 
You should take a look at the option to put your desktop to sleep. It boots in a second or two and it's just like you left it before putting it to sleep. I'm not really sure if the feature is called sleep or hibernate in english, but my desktop saves my current state and it's like it has shut completely down. You should be able to find it within the shutdown options in Windows. I'm only rebooting my computer once every month.
 
I also waste lot of time doing click i mean time between deciding to click and a click = 1 sec
average of 12000 clicks approx = 12000 seconds of time wasted
i need to shorten this gap of clicking too and distance between words on my keyboard needs to be shortened too wastes lot of time and energy

Your logic sounds like i should not wear dress because i waste lot of time and horniness while getting undressed

6enQwWj
 
You should be able to find it within the shutdown options in Windows.

I have my laptop power button set to hibernate instead of shut down, still never use it.
I just shut the lid.

Suppose i could set the lid to hibernate when closed...
To shut down I have to go through the start menu.

I just really can't be arsed messing about tbh, shut lid, open lid - done ;-)
 
pics or it didn"t happen

tumblr_my8oc25diw1sm7cxco1_400.gif
 
The only time I ever restart is when Windows updates forces me to.. God I hate that.
Kill that damn service and it won't force you anymore. Next search for how to disable the forced restarts permanently, it just requires a restart which is why you should kill the service.

I have my laptop power button set to hibernate instead of shut down, still never use it.
I just shut the lid.

Suppose i could set the lid to hibernate when closed...
To shut down I have to go through the start menu.

I just really can't be arsed messing about tbh, shut lid, open lid - done ;-)
I press the win key on my keyboard, the right arrow twice, and enter and it does the trick. It will unfortunately not have a desired effect if I "close" my monitor as you would with a laptop, else I would sure be doing the same thing.

And I guess I was trying to say to boot from the RAM as bartosimpsonio said, I just had no idea that was what I was doing.
 
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seriously how do you NOT reboot your pc at the end of the day ?! my freaking windows 7 desktop is slow at the end of the day ..i cannot let it run overnight
i guess you have better pc ..:-(
 
We have three computers in the office and all of them stay on 24/7 and only 2 are ever used. The MegaCoins are not going to mine themselves and we cbf turning computers back on.
 
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