Do you turn off your PC at night?

An article over at Microsoft Small Business Center asks: Do you need to turn off your PC at night?.

More often than not I leave my desktop PC on overnight. I only turn them off if I will be away for a day or more. Most of the time, it’s running Limewire, iTunes or some torrents but sometimes I just leave it there with nothing to do. I just turn off the monitor/LCD to save on electricity. I do this primarily because there are cases when I need to login or use the PC so quickly, it’s easy to just turn on the LCD/monitor than to wait 2-3 minutes for Windows to boot up.

The article discusses the use of sleep or hibernate instead of turning it off or pulling the plug. An unplugged PC still consumes 2.3 watts (because of LAN) and uses the same power during hibernate while on “sleep” mode, it eats up 3.1 watts. Regular monitors consume 75 watts when left on, 5 watts in “sleep” mode while LCD monitors eats up 22 watts when turned on and 3.3 watts in sleep mode.

These might be small figures but if you add them up in a year (365 days), you could save up to thousands of pesos (depending where you are or how much your power rate is).

So, do you also leave your PC on at night?

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

30 Comments

Jeffrey Wong says:

18 years ago

I dont turn them off at night, but during the day. I’m a vampire webdesigner!
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Aggie says:

18 years ago

We dont turn our PC off either, we usually shut it down once a week, and I had issues with this before with my husband because I thought we were eating so much electricity! It turns out I am wrong :D
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Chino Yray says:

18 years ago

I do turn it off. I have lots of stuff to download but I still turn it off when we go to sleep. But if it’s daylight and I’m just in school or work or any meeting…

it’s ON. the whole day.
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Noemi says:

18 years ago

When I used to have a desktop, I never shut it off unless we had a vacation that lasted more than 2 days. That PC lasted me 6 years.
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MM del Rosario says:

18 years ago

I always turn off my computer’s monitor at night and even my TV, i don’t leave them on standby. I have read that switching appliances off at the power point will cut your electricity usage by up to 11 per cent.
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jhay says:

18 years ago

My pc is turned off when I go to sleep and goes back on after I wake up.

I only leave it on orvernight for a download to finish or a defrag to be completed.

Plus, i restart the pc every 4 hours, just to keep it fresh.
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juantanamera says:

18 years ago

Sometimes no, sometimes yes. I turn my desktop off for 2 reasons, the heat and the noise.
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Pink Frog says:

18 years ago

Newp. I leave them on because the tracker site I’m subscribed to will boot me off if my Bittorrent ratio goes down below .80. Seed seed seed.
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Onyo says:

18 years ago

My pc is always on all the time, where the os take care of it in standby. From my experience from my job it is better to to be on or standby than to turn in off every time you you have to use it. I always recommend to my friends that it is better to do it that way than to turn it off, even your tvs and other consumer devices.
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AJ says:

18 years ago

I leave my notebook on all the time! Oh wow, thanks for this information. Will definitely help me save money on electric bills!
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