What If You Never Turn Off Your Computer?

Will leaving your PC on 24/7 hurt it, or could it actually do it some good?

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[OotoriKyouya]

I have a i5-2500K and it has been going strong for over 10 years now. The only time that I shut it down is when I clean the computer once a month. It still looks brand new to this day

[ScottGrammer]

Pro electronics repair tech here. The info about electrolytic capacitors was well-explained, but it should be emphasized that heat is the thing that kills caps the quickest, whether cheap ones or good ones. Leaving your computer on but idle generates little heat, but leaving it on while it's maxed out (crypto mining, running distributed computing apps, or video/3D rendering) can expose the caps on all the boards to more heat than usual. This is part of why good case ventilation is key. And yes, solid electrolytics are much preferable to old-style liquid electrolytics, as they're more heat resistant and they perform better even when brand-new. Great video!

Edit: The reason liquid caps are used in power supplies is that solid caps of the needed capacities and voltage ratings would not fit in the allotted space, and would be prohibitively expensive.

[King_Dub_Dub]

Story time: my friend's dad runs a pizza restaurant and has 4 PC's to run the registers and stuff. There is only one spot in the entire kitchen they can go where there's an accessible outlet and there bluetooth is in range to keep the registers running, anywhere else they can't power them without tripping on a power cable or the registers' proximity alarms go off when they're farther than 7 feet from the machines. These PC's are right next to the oven. The oven exhaust vent. On the floor. They also haven't been turned off in years, the longest running one has an uptime of 4 years and not a single stick of ECC RAM.

There is no ending, this crime is still ongoing. Nothing has gone wrong yet.
YET.

[spence]

this is very hardware-focused, i wouldve liked to hear about reloading drivers, clearing cache and tmp, and other things that could corrupt an os if left on for a rly long time

[RistrayGR]

The reason I turn my computer off at night, or if I'm going away for more than a couple of hours, was not so much about worrying about the components but about the electricity consumption, both electric bill wise and environmentally. Otherwise I just put it to sleep.

[fiskfisk]

After like 5-6 years of almost continuous use my old cheap monitor died.
I looked inside it and replaced a bulging cap in the power stage.
Now its been running for another 4 years and counting. :)

[z-to]

For most consumers that don't need remote access or use their PC for work, I cannot see why you would leave it on all the time. SSDs have reduced startup to seconds, so shutting down isn't likely to affect anything. The power draw from the wall and higher energy bill should be reason enough to shut it down.

[JSTheAnonymousOne]

15 years, holy cow. Also, SMART isn't always going to alert you to an issue, drives can easily die without warning. However, it's a great tool and I definitely recommend keeping an eye on the stats.

[muizzy]

Fun fact: Hard drives typically have a longer lifespan when in continuous operation (assuming you disable the park setting). Spinning up and down is pretty tough on ye ol' spinning rust.

[filipjovanovic]

I currently use my gaming laptop as a headless game streaming server, hidden in the closet under the stairs. It’s on 24/7 and works beautifully, but I should probably disconnect the battery before it explodes from abuse and sets the house on fire

[bloxyman]

I have always had my computers that i actively use on 24/7 since late 90s and none of them failed. The only ones that well died was those in storage switched off for years.
Hard drives as well I have found last longer when they run 24/7 compared to being power cycled all the time.

I also do the same with my hi-fi equipment and have had same experience. I am now currently using a kenwood ka-6100 amplifier from the 1960s and it has not been switched off for years with exception of power outages or when moving it and it still works perfectly even though it has all original caps.

[Microang]

Been running my Mac Pro from 2009 24/7 for a long time now, sits there mining all the time now when I'm not using it and the only issue is the amount of dust it gets inside from it. And it's been heavily upgraded to still be useful in 2022, even if it's still a beastly 12 core machine...

[dj_paultuk]

I work in a DC for Americas largest bank and we still have some "Compaq Proliant ML370 G1's" in use. Circa 2002. Still with the original 9.1GB hard drives. So 20yrs old and still going strong.

[thexgamer]

Me: *Never turn off my computer*

My computer: *You won’t let me live. You won’t let me die.*

[MrJest]

I've generally kept my systems running 24/7 since I got my first 8088 machine. In the pre-2000 days, it was generally considered good practice and would prolong machine life, as power-cycling older components could introduce more wear-and-tear than just leaving it on all the time. After the early part of this century, however, this had pretty much ceased to be a concern and powering down and then on again as often as you wished wasn't a huge problem. But I left mine on all the time more or less out of habit. These days, now that I work from home exclusively, I'll often have jobs that run overnight anyway, so again my systems stay on all the time. I just have to remember to replace my HDDs from time to time. 😋

[tipsysmichigander]

I think it really depends on the build and how well you cool your rig.

Have my I7-7700 1080ti 11g on pretty much 24/7 running heavy VR loads/video/graphical rendering/recording pretty much all my games. Still benchmarks just under what it did 5 years ago.

[sergiolaca]

I would like to add that having it 24/7 can have some long term software performance problems due to temporary files, cache data... This can be easily correct restarting it each several time, but it has not the top performance during all the time until you restart it.

[miquelfire]

I have a monitor that I bought when Circuit City was closing, and it's still running strong! It's my second monitor now since I finally bought a second display last year.

[Haplo-san]

I heard lots of stories from people experienced and it also happened to me as well: When the time comes, 9 out of 10 times, you shut down a working computer and it never boots again. That's usually how a computer dies due to age if not user's fault like liquid damage or dropping etc. If a PC living down the stretch and you don't know when it's gonna die (usually happens about 10+ years old PCs or 6+ years laptops) it's usually better to not shut down because you can't be sure if it's ever gonna boot again.

[MrRomDAW]

I am always paranoid my cooling loop - knowing that I put it together - is gonna spring a leak. I like leaving it on sometimes so I can remote in but it’s always in the back of my head!