Computer Question (OT)

No problem with leaving your PC on. I would ensure that the monitor is energy wise and goes to sleep as it is one of the biggest user of power. You might also be wise to check periodically that the fan is working fine as endless use will clog up the fan and mean an earlier demise for its fan.

Also to make use of your machine at night you might want to consider going to United Devices.com and see about donating all the extra CPU cycles to cancer research.

cheers, Todd

Dwight1973 said:

This may sound dumb, but I have to ask. I have been leaving my
computer on since I got it a couple years ago. At night when I go
to bed I just leave it on. Is this harmful at all? Does it matter
if you turn it off or not? Does anyone else do this?

Click to expand...

Thanks, Maxven. It's nice to hear info from Jutland. -- http://www.pbase.com/julivalley/galleries21oo , B-3oo3o4oJuli

no mather what you do. Neither will brake anything. But ...

I have seen flame coming out of a screen and flame coming out of the power-sup of a computer. I do some consulting at a facility where there is a lot of computers and this first hand experiences.

Gaetan J.

Gaetan J. said:

no mather what you do. Neither will brake anything. But ...

I have seen flame coming out of a screen and flame coming out of
the power-sup of a computer. I do some consulting at a facility
where there is a lot of computers and this first hand experiences.

Gaetan J.

Click to expand...

Ever seen a ball of fire come out of a hard drive?

Terry Thorn said:

Gaetan J. said:

no mather what you do. Neither will brake anything. But ...

I have seen flame coming out of a screen and flame coming out of
the power-sup of a computer. I do some consulting at a facility
where there is a lot of computers and this first hand experiences.

Gaetan J.

Click to expand...

Ever seen a ball of fire come out of a hard drive?

Click to expand...

Never out of a HDD but I've gotten one of my older boxes to spew smoke out the powersupply fan vents! I had a short somewhere that burned through the insulation, luckily after replacement of the wire the box was still alive.

he he..
--DSL

Dwight1973 said:

This may sound dumb, but I have to ask. I have been leaving my
computer on since I got it a couple years ago. At night when I go
to bed I just leave it on. Is this harmful at all? Does it matter
if you turn it off or not? Does anyone else do this?

Click to expand...

As others have mentioned, keeping any electronic device on actually will extend the useable life of your equipment but at the rate of technological advance you'll replace it long before it conks out on you through failure. Personaly, I used to keep my pc's on all the time, as well as keeping on my two switches, and print server but I stopped for one reason, the heat!! Those puppies made it very very warm in my bedroom even on cold winter days! (I have 6 towers in my bed room along with the network that connects them.) Now that I am only doing work on at most 2-3 of the machine at a time I don't mind turning them off at the end of day.

Regards,
--DSL

I gotta tell this one. One of the computers I'd built for a co-worker had the power supply go out and it was still under warranty. I took the CPU back to the parts store and told them what the problem was. The manager said that her tech would have to verify it was indeed a dead power supply so I took it to the back and handed it through the window to the technician. He laid the CPU on it's side, hooked up another power supply to it, and then, as I watched in shock, he stuck a screwdriver into it intending to jump the power pins on the motherboard but, instead, he hit the power pin and the HDD activity pin. All of sudden, I saw a small ball of fire shoot out from the bottom of the hard drive and the tech jumped back and stared wide-eyed at the smoke. THEN, he said, "Hey man... it looks like you've got a bad hard drive!" I was still in shock and I just stared at him for a second and then I said, "Well it is NOW!" And then I had to argue with the manager in order to get the hard drive replaced but they DID replace it.