Evil… for home use, do you think it’s better to log off a PC or shutdown? We finally got a new one and I know we leave them n at work all the time, but not sure what’s best to do at home.I am an IT Tech and sometimes its hard for us thechie types to step down from the Enterprise level we live at to answer a question for the home user mostly because we see our time as valuable. But I thought this was a worthy question and I could help a friend and now I would like to share my responce with you as well...
It always depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your PC but usually for a home PC it would be better to shutdown when not in use. It will save power and save wear and tear on the PC itself. Usually a home PC isn’t used that often, maybe a couple of hours a day. There isn’t much need for it to be on in the long hours that the family is a sleep at night or away at school and work during the day. You only need your computer up if its working while you are asleep or away. Sometime I have applications running that work on downloading large files that take a long time so I let it run during the night to find my files downloaded for me in the morning.
Of course make sure you keep the computer up to date with all necessary security patches and keep your Virus software up to date. Some automatic update configurations wait for opportune moments to update the PC such as at night when no one would be using the PC. You should check occasionally to make sure updates are working properly and change configs to work with your usage of the PC and/or manually update the PC yourself.
I don’t see any reason a desktop PC needs to be running 24/7 (although my PC seems to be left on a lot). Starting up and shutting down a PC is not difficult and newer PCs seem to have a relatively quick boot time. But if you are one of those people who find it a pain to shut down and start up a PC you can also look into the option of using the power potions in the Control Panel. You can set the PC to ‘sleep’ or ‘hibernate’ when the computer has not been used for a certain amount of time if someone walks away from the PC but forgets to shut it down. Using this method it will switch to a low power mode saving the state of the PC so when the user returns the user can wake the computer back up returning to the previous saved state.
Sleep = low power mode, memory is left energized to save the state of the PC. Usually pressing a key on the keyboard will bring the PC out of sleep mode. If the power button flashes on and off while in sleep mode the power button will be used to bring out of sleep mode. Options in BIOS can also be set to change sleep/wake behavior. The down side is If power is lost to PC, the state is lost and the computer will need to be booted up as normal and any unsaved progress will be lost.
Hibernate = memory and complete state of PC are saved to hard drive before PC is completely powered off. Powering PC up as normal, the PC will boot up and return PC to previous saved state. Hibernate mode takes slightly longer than sleep mode to wake the computer back up but has advantage that PC is completely powered off while in hibernate