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Keeping an iMac on all day, possibly longer?

I have a 2005 G5 PowerMac its on most of the day, so up to 18 hours a day. I do put it to sleep each night or when I'm out for the day, I work from home. Only leaving it on if I'm backing up or downloading something. I plan to do the same with my new iMac... if Apple ever makes a new one. Only time I restart are if there is a problem or an update requires it.
 
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Sue De Nimes said:
Sorry, I have had a Mac for about 3 months now.

Where is the off button?
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I hope you're joking. But just in case you're not, it's good to know where it is for that rare time when it gets stuck so bad that you can't get to force quit and you need to force power off. (This happens to me maybe once a year.) It's behind the lower-left corner of the screen.
 
Well i work in IT support and in my own experience i find computer equipment which is switched on and off a lot, or aren't used often are a lot less reliable in the long term.

Before i got into this kind of work i would only ever switch my stuff on when i needed it, sometimes for a few hours then turn it off. I found that sometimes i would only get a couple of years out of a computer before i got power or hard drive problems. After i started leaving my Macs on 24/7 i've found them a lot more reliable. My current late 2009 iMac has been on since i bought it 2 and a half years ago with only an occasional reboot, not a single problem. My iMac before that, 4 years before a hard drive failure (most likely my fault as i would encode video for weeks at a time making it too hot lol) My work Dell laptop has been on for the past 3 years with no issues, and the one before that was the same. Same story with my work Dell PC.
 
Personally I power down each night, not out of fear of a hardware or other failure, just because I like to start fresh with no memory hangs each day. Also, I carry my MBP everywhere I go and feel better about having it off when doing so - not a scientific reason, just for peace of mind. I do run the maintenance scripts that would otherwise run in the background overnight at my convenience using Onyx. As far as I know, OS X still has night time maintenance scripts, but others can confirm.
 
JoeRito said:
Personally I power down each night, not out of fear of a hardware or other failure, just because I like to start fresh with no memory hangs each day.
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It is not necessary to shut down for memory reasons. Mac OS X manages memory automatically, without any user interaction.
JoeRito said:
I do run the maintenance scripts that would otherwise run in the background overnight at my convenience using Onyx. As far as I know, OS X still has night time maintenance scripts, but others can confirm.
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Mac OS X maintenance scripts run automatically on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule. If your Mac is sleeping when the scripts are scheduled to run, they will automatically run the next time your Mac is awake. If your Mac is shut down when they're scheduled to run, they will automatically run at the next scheduled time when your Mac is on.
 
GGJstudios said:
If your Mac is shut down when they're scheduled to run, they will automatically run at the next scheduled time when your Mac is on.
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But what if the scheduled time is after midnight and the Mac is always powered off at that time? That's why I run these scripts on demand using Onyx. Unless you are saying they will run the next time I power on. Thanks for your many helpful replies GGJ:apple:
 
JoeRito said:
But what if the scheduled time is after midnight and the Mac is always powered off at that time? That's why I run these scripts on demand using Onyx. Unless you are saying they will run the next time I power on. Thanks for your many helpful replies GGJ:apple:
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That's one reason why it's not necessary to power off every night. If you never have it powered on at the scheduled time, you can also manually trigger the maintenance scripts by using Maintidget - The OS X Maintenance Scripts Widget.
 
(short background story START)
I now have windows PC and I'm waiting to buy my first Mac
(short background story STOP)

So you are all saying that working 24/7 for all that stuff is better, and I agree with this one (as for ex. it is better to HDD to just work and as less as you can land with disk arm on disk) but I'm very curious about one thing:

In widnows there is Sleep and Hibernate option:
Sleep - saves your data to RAM, PC is in low power consumption mode
Hibernate - saves your data on disk and turn off PC - and we don't want that.

So, as we want for our devices and Mac internals to work 24/7, in similiar as Sleep option in OS X (I don't know it name) : is OS X turning your HDD of?

If yes, it's not good to turn on this option?! Correct me if I'm wrong.
 
This query is a bit of an old chestnut!

Obviously it is a good idea to switch off equipment that is going to be left unattended for any length of time. However, if the machine is in regular use, Apple actually recommends putting it to sleep.

It is also a fact that continually switching electronic equipment off and on can actually reduce the life of the equipment. This is because the initial switch-on power surge will put considerable strain on components (i.e. electrolytic capacitors) within the PSU.
 
John T said:
This query is a bit of an old chestnut!

Obviously it is a good idea to switch off equipment that is going to be left unattended for any length of time. However, if the machine is in regular use, Apple actually recommends putting it to sleep.

It is also a fact that continually switching electronic equipment off and on can actually reduce the life of the equipment. This is because the initial switch-on power surge will put considerable strain on components (i.e. electrolytic capacitors) within the PSU.
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If Apple would implement a working WWOL (Wireless Wake On Lan), I would let my iMac sleep all the time. I just cannot get it to reliably wake up from my iPad or iPhone when I need to remote into it away from home. It wakes fine from within my home network, but is hit-and-miss when outside of it.
 
Chippy99 said:
It wears the fans out and wastes electricity. Better to turn it off in my view.
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Wearing out fans takes so many years, I wouldn't worry about it. And who cares about power Bills?

I leave my Macs and PC's on all the time. I even have some cheapo Dell Celeron D towers, they were like 400 bucks each, ( they all are totally filled with hard drives ), theyve never been turned off save power failures. Never had an issue. IF a 400 dollar Dell tower has no issues, Macs shouldn't.

This goes for almost any computer, Windows and OSX are both so stable and well tuned, they really don't need to be shut down, and most hardware made in the last 15 years can be on 24/7 no problem at all.
 
WesCole said:
If Apple would implement a working WWOL (Wireless Wake On Lan), I would let my iMac sleep all the time. I just cannot get it to reliably wake up from my iPad or iPhone when I need to remote into it away from home. It wakes fine from within my home network, but is hit-and-miss when outside of it.
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I might be sketchy on the details of Wake on LAN... but what you are describing is Wake on WAN... meaning LAN is Local Area Network... ie within your home network. Outside the LAN and you may be connected to a WAN or Wide Area Network... or you could be connected to the Internet (which may be an WAN, but is most definitely not a LAN)
 
I've also had several PCs over the years set up as a file server and torrent machine which is on 24/7, the LCD is set to turn off after a few hours. The current one is about 4 years old and the only internal part replaced was the power supply which was getting noisy. Easier/cheaper to replace the whole PS than just the fan inside. I also just replaced the LCD as the old one was not turning on properly. So I got a new 24" for my G5 and handed down the 21.5 it was running to the PC, it also has more RAM now (2Gb) and newer/bigger HDDs for 5Tb of internal storage.

Sad to say that in a lot of ways it might be more reliable than my G5 which runs about 16-18 hours each day so gets 6-8 hours off (asleep) each night. I only restart the PC when an update requires it or a crash happens, which is not that often in this XP Pro machine.
 
The power usable for more modern PC/Mac's is no more than a big screen TV and if you have an iMac it's usually less. As has been said before in sleep mode you use next to no power that it's unlikely to impact on your power bill.
 
My 2008 iMac has been running non-stop except for the occasional restart for 4 years now. There is extra stress on the HDD but i am always upgrading that anyway.
 
forty2j said:
I hope you're joking. But just in case you're not, it's good to know where it is for that rare time when it gets stuck so bad that you can't get to force quit and you need to force power off. (This happens to me maybe once a year.) It's behind the lower-left corner of the screen.
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The question was rhetorical.
 
G51989 said:
Wearing out fans takes so many years, I wouldn't worry about it. And who cares about power Bills?

I leave my Macs and PC's on all the time. I even have some cheapo Dell Celeron D towers, they were like 400 bucks each, ( they all are totally filled with hard drives ), theyve never been turned off save power failures. Never had an issue. IF a 400 dollar Dell tower has no issues, Macs shouldn't.

This goes for almost any computer, Windows and OSX are both so stable and well tuned, they really don't need to be shut down, and most hardware made in the last 15 years can be on 24/7 no problem at all.
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It might surprise you how much it costs to power a computer 24/7 for a year. Most desktop computers consume ~80-100w of power when on, even with the screen off. At 100 watts 24/7, that's $110/year. Older computers, especially the Celerons, are much worse. Furthermore, if you live in a warm climate, you have to spend money again to air condition all that heat you are creating.

Since I've switched from an old 7-drive NAS and a HTPC that were both powered on 24/7, replaced the HTPC with an AppleTV, configured my iMac to sleep and WOL, and my cable box finally got an update that forces it to sleep reliably, I've seen a big reduction in my monthly bills - like close to $30 - and I did that without any serious downsides.
 
I have an iMac and 2 Mac Minis. Since I used them for EyeTV, I would prevent them from going to sleep so they could share shows across the network. They been running for several years non-stop and the only problem I had was the HD in one of the minis went.

I don't see a problem letting them run full time.
 
Wow, leaving the iMac on 24/7 seems 99% unanimous. Well, thats me swayed. On it stays! :)
 
Yeah but wat about sleeping option? Is sleeping turning off your HDD? If yes, it's not so good to often turn on and then turn off your HDD...
 
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