Question by Travelling B:
What is the ideal way to save electricity 1) to leave personal running all day long or 2) turn on and shut down?

I want to save electricity and I am never sure which one is better… What do you think?


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Answer by lc001
In general, ideal to turn of the machine when you are done.

If you want to be lazy, you need to be using the machine pretty much 18 hours + per day to make it worth keeping on.

Therefore, when you leave work, shut the thing down.

After you surf at home, shut the thing down.

Shutting down does other things too
- saves the screen from burn in (using screensavers help there, but all electronics have a limited run life).
- grants the operating system clear its memory so it can run cleaner and faster at boot up;
- grants the operating system to apply regular updates, mainly security updates, which do not happen when the thing is on;
- PREVENTS hackers from taking over your personal when you are not at the Computer – malware will often look for long idle times to activate and hand over control to remote hackers so they can either steal your data, use your Computer to spread viruses, or use your PC/hard drive to store unwanted data like porn.

A federal govt report indicates data centers are the single largest consumers of electrical power – and data centers are full of computers.

Hope this helps.

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What do you think? Answer below!

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