If a computer is idle for 2 + hours should you power it off and then boot up again or not ?
Thanks in advance

What exactly is the goal here? Fast boot or energy saving? Turn it off, save a tree or something.

For two hours, I put it into hibernate or standby mode. Overnight, I shut it off to save energy.

I hibernate my laptop.. and restart it once a week.

That was before I installed linux. Now I'm restarting every now and then as I play games on Windows and do everything else on linux.

Sleep mode is a lot faster to recover from, and it only draws a few watts.

I'd turn it off because on/off cycles aren't the only source of wear (and modern hard drives reduce this by lifting the heads off the platters on power-down instead of letting them come to rest on them). Heat damages electrolytic capacitors, which vary a lot in quality. For example, I have an EVGA brand graphics card that blew 3-4 no-name electrolytics in just a year of use, while the 9-year-old power supply that ran it, which is full of high-quality Japanese caps, is still fine. And when I say turn off the computer, I mean turn off even the AC going into it to completely eliminate wear on the caps (Antec SmartPower power supplies had a bad cap. that would wear out quickly otherwise).

try msconfig in run menu and deselect some unused programs then restart ur pc and u will get some much better speed..

I would say it depends on the type of machine.

If its a laptop or a very low power desktop, you might as well leave it on and just make sure the Display and HD go into sleep mode.
If its a beefy desktop machine with a Gaming Video Card and a high end CPU, shut it down and then boot it back up.

richps1961 said:THANKs to all of you that gave me " SERIOUS " answers.

Are you implying there were not serious answers? Seemed pretty on topic here.

richps1961 said:My concern was that I had heard that powering off and on causes more wear and tear on the computer.
Saving energy was a minor concern.Apparently turn-on amp surges aren't that bad because the electronics are made to withstand them, and they contain circuitry to bring up the voltages gradually to reduce the peak amps. I don't know about wear on hard drive bearings, but I read that it's not a big problem for other spiral bearings because of the special lubricants used. OTOH hard drive electronics do suffer from heat, and I years ago I'd regularly get free dud Maxtors that needed only some tiny cheap chips replaced. Those chips drove the motor and ran hot, like 70C or more, but that was supposed to be OK because they were rated for 125C.

The main reason I'd turn off the computer when it's not in use is capacitor quality, which varies all over the place, and unless you know that every cap on your motherboard and its plug-in cards (especially the graphics card) is Japanese, continuous operation is probably a bad idea.