This is something that has plagued me for years – should I leave my computer running all the time or not.

It is also a topic that has caused much debate.

Leave your PC running 24/7

Some people say that it’s better to leave your PC running around the clock than to shut it off at night and then boot it up in the morning. The reasoning behind this side of the story, is that if you never shut down your computer you will save wear and tear on it components and, therefore, extend the life of your machine.

Shut if off and boot it up in the morning

Others say that if you care at all about energy consumption (electricity is expensive after all) and how big of a carbon footprint you are leaving – turn off your computer at night. It takes less energy to boot your computer in the morning than to leave it running overnight. Plus there is the fact that many operating systems, Windows included, perform various important housekeeping tasks during shutdown and startup — another very good reason for turning the system off at night.

Personally, I’ve always been the type to shut off my computer at night when I go home (obviously I pay the electric bill plus we have a total of 6 computers in our office) and then power it up in the morning. Sure it takes a few minutes for my computer to boot up and load everything, but what the heck – I check voice mail while I’m waiting. Not having instant access to email as soon as I sit down in my chair is not going to hurt me in any way – while the increased electric bill could certainly put a bigger dent into our checking account!

Today I was going through a bunch of old PC World magazines and found an article written by Robert Strohmeyer about this very subject. Robert stated in his article that he had interviewed some of the top techies at HP, Seagate, and other major companies, and that nobody seemed to know how this rumor was born. But they all agreed on one thing “leaving your PC running 24/7 was NOT a good thing” and that “the claim of leaving your computer running overnight was good for it – was totally bogus.”

An HP Techie, Ken Bosley, who has spent years researching hard-drive reliability says that “you shouldn’t waste energy to extend the life of a computer by even a very small amount” and discounts the notion that “shutting down and starting up a computer puts undue stress on the components, noting that most systems are retired because of obsolescence, not because of hardware failure.”

Where do you stand on this issue? Do you shut your computer off at night or always leave it running… and why?

Acer Predator Aspire G a.k.a ASG7710-A41 should be loved by all gamers. Who can ignore its kind offering of a Core i7-950 running 3.06GHz CPU, 6GB of DDR3 RAM up to 12GB, an Intel X58 Express Chipset, 1TB of SATA HDD @ 7200rpm, two Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 (1GB of VRAM), a Blu-ray disc drive, as well as 11 USB 2.0 ports, 2 eSATA ports, a multi-card reader, 4 DVI-D ports and finally a two Gigabit Ethernet.

In addition, Aspire G will run on 64-bit Vista and also comes along with G9 Laser mouse and G15 gaming keyboard. There are no words on its availability, but this killer will not be that cheap with $2777 USD (1660 / 1950) price tag.

In the course of using your PC, you may have downloaded a lot of things such as softwares, songs, movies and others. Now these actually went left in the PC or hard disk takes up valuable space. So you need to periodically check what is in your PC. Some of the software that you downloaded is not used at all and these can be deleted. The movies that you downloaded can be burned into disks and then deleted from the PC. By doing this periodically you free up more space for the PC.

While you are saving such software, songs, movies and others in your PC you may also have saved them haphazardly. They are all over the hard disk. When you want such software, songs, movies and others it would take a longer time for your PC to locate them. So you need to defragment your hard disk so that the information stored is nicely filed.

While surfing the internet you may also unknowingly be infected by Spyware such as cookies and these hide in your hard disk. Over time you may have collected thousands of such cookies and they can slow down your PC. You need some kind of software to clean your PC from such cookies.

Your PC registry can also be clogged up by errors. Such errors over time can be in the thousands and they can also slow down your PC.