apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I've always turned mine off at night. At work, we restart them at the end of the day, so they're left on all night. Monitors are turned off overnight, though.

A lot of energy is wasted powering idle computers. I think shutting down is a good choice, but if you have a laptop with standby mode, you could just turn off the power strip to the computer and let it stay on standby through the battery.

I can't imagine *not* turning off my computer at night...do people still leave them on?? How antiquated.

Of course I turn it off. No reason not to.

I turn my laptop off at night (or hibernate if I know I'll need it first thing).

At work we restart at the end of the day, but we have to leave the machines on so they are connected to the network. Updates and patches are pushed out overnight by our IT folks.

As a computer professional, yeah no really turn them the @#^% off they will most likely NOT last as long when they have to run their cooling 24/7

I turn off my laptop, but my family has a desktop that is almost always switched on.

I shut the lid on my laptop and it hibernates at night. This is laziness on my part rather than any concern for the life of the computer. When was the last time your computer actually failed before it was rendered totally obsolete anyway?

Kirsten@Nexyoo, the flaw in your logic is that the battery will recharge when you plug the laptop back in, eating the power you "saved" overnight.

I turn mine to sleep mode every time I step away from it. I turn off the monitor, though. Is there a difference (energy-wise) between hibernate and sleep? If so, I can see myself putting it to hibernate instead. I've thought about turning it off each time, but it's really just a huge pain to have to re-open all the documents and programs that I had open before. I know it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but for me it is a significant annoyance, especially since I constantly have at least 4 PDFs or "learning modules" open (and finding my place in them each time is kind of lame, especially when they are >100pgs long). I'll green anything else (and I do), but I know that re-opening everything each morning would be a pain in the ass, so I do the next best thing.

I work at a company that says it's "Going green", but does nothing about, say, powering down the 30 computers in the work lab (or even the monitors!) at the end of the day (which comes at 3:00). I've talked to our tech support people about it, but no go. Turning off those monitors is just too much work, apparently.

Yes, both at work and home