I have a simple question and the answer may be all about personal preference.

Is it better to always shutdown your computer and reboot upon every use or just sign off or lock your screen and let it run?

I ask this because of the wear and tear of constantly starting the electronics. Maybe it's better to keep the machine running for extended periods of time, I mean like say two or three weeks or even a month. It would require some disk cleanup I would imagine like clearing the cache and temp folders along with the memory...maybe. Also, there is the electric bill to consider. I've done both recently. I am just curious to your thoughts and how many members if any leave their machine up and running.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

I do both. My main system is always on but my laptop and second desktop are only on when in use.

You ask a question that has been argued for a long time. I have never seen a truly definitive answer.

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My primary Win10 desktop system is always on except when we have an infrequent power failure. My UPS then keeps it on until I can properly shut it down.

My older dual-mode Win7/Win10 system stays off most of the time.

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BB
http://barrypatch.net

I suppose that's like asking "which came first the chicken or the egg?"

Once the computer has powered up from the initial surge at boot time the wear on the components would be minimal. That's my theory anyway.

BBarry I too have a second Windows 10 machine and a Windows 7 machine that aren't used everyday. The second Windows 10 machine I fire up once or twice a week so it can update if necessary.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

I shut mine down after my morning session and evening session.
I have friends that never shut theirs down and one morning they found
Windows 10 on it. They never told me until after the 30 days went by.

Smitty, I had a friend who turned her Win 7 computer off one night, and then back on the next morning. When she returned from getting a cup of coffee in her kitchen, she found Win 10 loading. I was able to revert to Win 7 and then install Never10.

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BB
http://barrypatch.net

To be honest one of the reasons that I leave my main on all the time is my daily and bi-weekly image backups. I would rather do my images when the system is idle and 4:00 AM is usually a good time. Still that is secondary. There are times that I'll go to bed or work leaving it re-encoding a list of videos.

I guess it boils down with me as being a matter of convenience. I get up in the morning or get off work and hit one button on a clicker and go change clothes or make a cup of coffee and everything is just up and going with the NFL channel on one screen, computer on the other with audio system on. LOL! If I'm going to be totally honest you could say it is a matter of lazy rather than convenience.

I cannot give reference material as this is just my opinion but if you leave your system always on I would suggest that you do not set your power setting to have your drives set to never off. Let the things spin down to help out the bearings. I have my main set to turn off the drives after 2 hours.

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Jay, how do you set your power settings to turn off the drives after 2 hours? I can't find that setting in Win 10. And the need to do that wouldn't apply to a solid state drive, would it?

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BB
http://barrypatch.net

I don't really know if it applies to an SSD but doubt that it does.

To get to the power settings you can go to your Control Panel then Power options. As to myself I just right click on my desktop and select Appearance or Personalize. From there I go to Themes then screen saver. For some obscure reason the screen saver window includes a link to power options.

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I currently have my main computer set for display turn off @ 3 hours and drives turn off @ never. I can turn off my movie drives (4) because they are installed in hot plug/hot swappable bays. The bays have an on/off button that powers down the drives without corruption. There are two other disk drives and 2 SSDs installed that probably could be powered down by sleep or hibernate. I may change it to 3 hrs & 3 hrs.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

@ Jay - I found the drives power setting....it was under Advanced Power Settings. I thought I had looked there, but guess not.

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BB
http://barrypatch.net

bbarry why did you revert her system back and then prevent Win 10 from loading again. I only ask this because you use it without incident. I'm just curious and a bit confused.

@ Jaylach > I've modified the hard drive settings to sleep after 3 hours and hibernate after 3-1/2 hours. When changing these settings I wondered if the sleep and hibernate should be set for the same time period. Your thoughts Jay.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

To be honest I don't use either sleep or hibernate so cannot really advise.

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Now I'm really confused Jay. How do you power down your drives without using either sleep or hibernate? When the drives go dormant aren't they in one of those two states?

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

Actually it would if you worry about. The biggest cause of failure is the heating and cooling puts physical stress on boards and can cause issues where components are attached to the boards. On newer equipment probably not a big deal, but on older hardware it can.

I think the point Jay is trying to make is that it's possible to set hard disk drives that aren't being "accessed" to power down in a multi drive system even when the system is being used, for instance... say you have a system that has a HDD solely for media files that only gets accessed once a week, it would make sense that you wouldn't want that drive 'spinning' 24/7 just because your running Windows doing other tasks 24/7.

Sleep and hibernate would only power down the 'media HDD' when the entire system is asleep or hibernating, whereas the following will allow you to "Turn Off" the drive when it's not in use irrespective of what the rest of the system is doing....

Windows 10: Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/214 ... -10-a.html

Windows 7: Hard Drive - Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle or Never
https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1 ... never.html
(Note: Applies to Vista and 8 as well.)

I hope that makes sense.

Thank you for the link that explains this confusing feature Doddie. I was always under the impression that the first setting for the hard disk controlled the whole computer. I actually felt there was a redundancy when Sleep and Hibernate settings are offered right below this. Another thing I learned from that article is you can have a different value in the "turn off hard disk" setting for each power plan you have.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

I was thinking about this at work and came to the conclusion that, if you use sleep or hibernate, you do not have to set anything on the drive at all as sleep or hibernate will turn off the drives anyway. When I think of a system being left on or turned off I don't consider sleep/hibernate. I think of always on as under full power which is how I've had my main system for ~4 years. Sleep is still on but at a much reduced power level basically just keeping the memory intact. Hibernate might as well be off as the system does power down after making an "image" of the system state. Image is likely the wrong word but the best that I can come up with at this time.

The only real exception I could think of on the above is if you leave your system on all day and let it go to sleep at night for a quicker start in the morning. In such a case you may want to set your drives to spin down (turn off) after 2-3 hours in advanced power settings. In either case setting the drives will not affect an SSD at all. (Thanks for the links Doddie, I got the last bit from the first link.)

I'm sorry to say that turning off drives via power settings affects ALL drives. You cannot select drives to turn off while leaving others on. Think about it... say you have a drive partitioned and are looking at your drives in Windows and decide that you should set a drive to turn off. It happens that this drive is actually a partition... Now you have a drive with one partition set to turn off and another partition set to stay on. I have no idea as to what problems this could cause. There may be third party software that can do this but I've never looked. If there is such software it would need to look at the drives as physical drives not as partitions.

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I did a quick search for third party software that would allow for selectively turning drives off and didn't come up with anything. However I did find a interesting point of fact... I'm sure, if you have shopped for drives, that you have seen designations of {brand name}{model} green or black. If you have a drive designated as Green it means that it is ecology friendly meaning that it uses less power. This means that it turns itself off on its own through its firmware. This is totally outside of the power settings that you set as it does it even if Windows isn't loaded. Sorry but I don't know if, if you have your power setting set to never off, this feature of a green drive will still work.

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We have many options to choose from including customizing our own power plan. I have reset all my stock power options back to default and deleted my customized plans. I created a couple new ones so I won't mess with the stock settings. I'll give these a try go from there. I set the machine to never sleep but the hard disks to turn off after 3 hours in one of my custom plans. One last question, does the hard disk setting take effect after the machine sits idle for the specified time? If so maybe I would dial that down to 1 hour.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

I was think back on this and the last hard drive failure I had was on a gateway 386 computer. It wasn't a mechanical failure but a board electronics failure.

The DRIVE needs to be idle for the specified time. To be honest this is mostly a discussion of theory when setting the off timer to hours as it will rarely happen that a drive is not read from or written to in that kind of time span. Any type of read/write will reset the timer.

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I'm not sure I understand the confusion. I reverted her system because that's what she wanted. She was very pleased with Win 7 and was a little perturbed that Win 10 was installed w/o her explicit approval. I then installed Never10 because she didn't want that to happen again. Some people are very happy with Win 7, and she was/is one of them. So I was just doing what a friend asked me to do. Wouldn't you do the same?

Although I also like Win 7, I finally bit the bullet and installed Win 10. And I'm glad I did, as I am thoroughly enjoying it. But IMHO, me using it w/o incident has no bearing on my friend's desire to stay with Win 7.

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BB
http://barrypatch.net

@bbarry > It was just a question. I apologize if that bothered you. If that's what she wanted that's fine. Win 7 is still good for another 4 yrs...maybe.

@Jaylach > I suppose the "hard disk off" setting value is something that feels comfortable with the user.

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Terry

It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another!
_Rosanne Rosannadanna

Yep, pretty much a setting of preference.

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