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Turning off your Mac?

A

acuriouslad

macrumors regular
Original poster
Ok this question relates to all of your with any Mac although I decided to post it here as I am planning on buying an iMac in the up and coming months.

Should you turn off your Mac?😕

Does it burnout and not last as long or cause problems if you leave it on 24/7?
 
I never turn off my iMac, it is turned on 24/7 - sure, I could save some costs by switching it off. But I use the same apps everytime I use the comp, and by just putting it to sleep it saves me a lot of time.

When putting it to sleep, the LCD is turned off - so there is no chance it is getting burnout or something like that. I belive that the rest of the comp is getting no och very litte chance of burnouts happening while in sleep-mode.
 
Hi,

Same as above poster, I only put mine to sleep which is great because it wakes up in less than 6 seconds and goes to sleep in around 2 seconds. This means that to all intents and purposes the machine is always available for "immediate" use and yet only consumes 3 watts when sleeping. When powered on with the CPU idle it consumes 93 watts and at full CPU load on both cores it consumes about 125 watts. (Spec of iMac in signature below).

To give you an idea of energy costs, here in the UK as a rule of thumb every watt when running 24x7 costs about £1 per year. So 93 watts would cost around £93 per year for electricity versus roughly £30 when sleeping 2/3 of the time and powered on 1/3 of the time. £60 is worth saving, especially when it takes almost no effort to do so!

Cheers,
Craig.

ps. Power measurement was done by me using a plug-in power meter.
 
Putting your computer to sleep is the way to go. It comsumes the same amount of power as when it is turned off. Putting your computer to sleep just saves everything that is running in your ram to a small file on your hard disc and then turns off. Then when you atart up it just opens that file in your ram and your computer should be in the same state as when you put it to sleep.
 
It's actually a bad thing to turn off or even deep sleep (as in the machine, not just the display) your OS X-running Mac at night. Why? Well, if your Mac is turned off or asleep at night, it's unable to run its daily, weekly, and monthly self-maintenance tasks. If these can't run, crud will pile over time and slow things down.
 
iindigo said:
It's actually a bad thing to turn off or even deep sleep (as in the machine, not just the display) your OS X-running Mac at night. Why? Well, if your Mac is turned off or asleep at night, it's unable to run its daily, weekly, and monthly self-maintenance tasks. If these can't run, crud will pile over time and slow things down.
Click to expand...

Not really, the tasks run the next time the computer starts or is woken up. Anyway, I leave my Mac Pro on 24/7 maxing out all the processors with SETI@home and have yet to notice any negative effects... and the power bill isn't too bad either. Next to it my PowerBook sleeps until it needs use and I have yet to notice any negative effects with that as well.
 
I always sleep my mac. It's so much easier on your internal components. If I know I will be away for a day or so, then I will turn it off.

I use istat for monitoring. It displays how long your mac has been running.
I got it up to 18 days once. 😀 Unfortunately I had to do a restart, to boot from my other drive.
 
The only time I shut it down is if I'm not going to be there for a day or more, since I don't access it remotely. As others have said, sleep saves both time and energy.
 
iindigo said:
It's actually a bad thing to turn off or even deep sleep (as in the machine, not just the display) your OS X-running Mac at night. Why? Well, if your Mac is turned off or asleep at night, it's unable to run its daily, weekly, and monthly self-maintenance tasks. If these can't run, crud will pile over time and slow things down.
Click to expand...

OSX runs the maintenance scripts at a later time if your iMac is not on during the night. It will also not run the scripts if your Mac is in sleep-mode. In sleep mode all the necessary components (CPU, HDD) are powered down only the RAM is powered up to hold its content.
Some previous OSX versions supposedly had trouble running these scripts if your Mac was not running. From what I have seen so far Leopard simply runs them the next time it gets a chance.

I usually also use sleep-mode. One word of caution. Save your work do disk before you put the machine to sleep. Otherwise this work is lost if the power is cut-off. Sometimes this happens even in Germany 😉
 
I leave my computer on 24/7. Although when I'm away and not encoding something I set the Processor Performance to "reduced".
 
I always turn my computers off at night, both Mac and Windows, and I have done it that way for years. It only takes my Mac 30 seconds to boot and my Windows computer about 90 seconds. People have been arguing for years about which way is best.
 
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