Do you leave your computer on?

[pprior]

Mine is pretty much 24x7 uploading to mozy, so it's always on.

 

[kunia]

when I'm out of the house - sleep
overnight - sleep (unless I'm downloading something)
when I'm in the house, but not using the computer - on with displays off
out of the house for more than 2 days - off
out of the house for a vacation - off and unplugged

My monitors (both ACDs) are set to turn off automatically after 10 minutes of inactivity - power and brightness buttons are both disabled and "do nothing" in the preference. I simply hit command+option+eject to sleep and turn off my displays.

I sometimes leave my mac on overnight just so it can run the maintenance scripts - it's sort of a habit - started doing that when I got my first Mac Pro back in 2007

 

[scottsjack]

I usually turn mine off and shut off the two power strips. That kills the MP, the power supply to the MBP, the XP-only Mini, the powered speakers, any aux hard drives and the printers. The only thing left with power is the cable modem. I agree, why waste power. All three systems boot plenty fast enough.

 

[talmy]

I sleep all but my server. I even slept PCs before I switched to Macs 4 years ago. Back then I purchased Dell commercial models that were certified to sleep (home models were not).

 

[talmy]

I sleep all but my server. I even slept PCs before I switched to Macs 4 years ago. Back then I purchased Dell commercial models that were certified to sleep (home models were not).

Power consumption is pretty close to "off" and thunderstorms are rare here. Even in "off" parts of the system continue to be powered, so you really need to unplug electronics in a storm.

 

[holmesf]

I turn it off. Not rebooting at least occasionally can lead to a pretty severe performance hit, from experience.

If you have a lot of RAM, the reverse is actually true. Mac OS X will cache things read from disk into "inactive memory". When those items are requested again they come from memory instead of disk. The longer you leave your machine on, the better this cache becomes, and you'll see improved performance when launching applications and when reading frequently accessed files. This makes a strong case for putting your computer to sleep, because the cache is preserved.

I have Powerbook G4 which I use as a server; it's been running under medium load for the past 2 years and never experience performance problems. Current uptime is 278 days! Mac OS X has a solid Unix foundation that is built for running continuously.

 

[alphaod]

Never turn mine off. The only I do when I leave it turn off the monitors.

I run mine as a server, so it does need to be on 24/7.