If you've been confused by people telling you what's better; to shut off
the computer or just leave it on 24/7 to avoid unnecessary wear and tear, as well
as slow boot times; then this video is something you're gonna want to listen to.
I'll explain the difference of shutting down the computer versus restarting it;
and what the problems are that you may not be aware of, with not shutting the
computer down ever, so, all this coming up!
so first off, if you find my video's helpful, please give it a thumbs up and
subscribe if you haven't. It really helps me out with making it all worthwhile to
keep making more helpful tech-torials for you guys. So let's dive in. There are some
different myths and truths about shutting down or leaving the computer on;
and I'm gonna explain what these differences are and help you be able to
make the right decision for you for any given situation. So the first thing is
leaving the computer on because it just takes too long to boot up.
Well first off, if waiting 2 minutes is too long for you to wait for the
computer to finish booting up and running all the services and background
startup items that you have set to run; then you might want to look at upgrading
to a solid-state drive or SSD. That option would be a whole lot better than
just leaving it on all the time and I'll explain why that is in a little bit.
The other thing is if your computer takes a lot longer than two minutes to boot up,
then there could be some other underlying issues that you need to
address. There could be an issue with the hard drive that's dying, or there could
be some software conflicts, a virus, or a hacker could even be in your system.
So there's a lot of different reasons why it could be slow, and it's probably
something you should be looking at rather than just avoiding that and
leaving the computer on and turning a blind eye. The third thing is increased
wear and tear by having to shut the computer off and on every day. That's a
bit of a myth, because as long as the computer is on, unless it's gone into a
deep hibernation and turns off the hard drive, it's actually running 24/7.
When it does go to hibernate, it does need to write files back to the drive
to have it ready to start back up again and continue where it left off.
So in essence, leaving the computer on 24/7 isn't helping you to reduce the wear and
tear. If anything it's increasing the wear and tear because it has to write
more to the drive to save it from memory to the drive,
so that when you wake it up, it continues where it left off; versus when you shut
it down, it just clears the memory and you're able to start everything fresh again.
So now that you know that you're not doing your computer any favors by
leaving it on 24/7; let me explain the risks and benefits about leaving a
computer on versus turning it off. Firstly it helps to understand the
difference between turning your computer off versus restarting it. So when you
turn the computer off, the next time when you turn it on, it goes through a POST,
or a Power-On Self-Test, and what that does, depending on the motherboard and the
manufacturer that you have, it will run a series of short tests on the hard drive,
CPU, the memory, and just test everything out and make sure everything was working
properly and there's no obvious signs of problems. If you're restarting a computer,
it just restarts it to apply updates and changes that happened. It clears out the
memory and allows it to look for new updates. So if you're having a problem
with the computer a lot of times just restarting it will fix things because it
flushes out the memory gives all the programs in the system a chance to reset
and clear itself again; but if the issue is something more hardware related,
then physically powering a computer off and leaving it off for a bit and turn it
back on can help. Also to take it a step further, if you're having problems where
a reboot or just turning it off and on doesn't help, then try powering it off,
pulling the power cord out of the back of the unit as well as any USB devices
just unplug everything to make sure that there's nothing else giving or taking
power from it. Leave it all unplugged for at least a half an hour, and in
addition to that you can press the power button a few times to just make sure
that you flush any residual power out of the system.
Nothing will happen most likely, you won't see any light flash or anything.
There might be a quick light flash, just to show that
there was a little bit of residual power in there, but that's it, don't expect to
see anything happen because everything's unplugged.
We're just flushing the system. After a half-an-hour, plug everything back in and
you can turn it back on. If that doesn't solve the issue, then you're gonna need
to get an expert to look at the system and troubleshoot the hardware first.
Make sure the hardware is fine. Assuming the hardware is ok, then they have to look at
the software for any software conflicts. So that gets a little bit outside the
scope of this video, but let's look at the next thing here of Windows updates
and other program updates. You would not be getting any further updates in a lot
of cases until you restart the computer. It can apply the updates that were just
downloaded and installed before it goes looking for the next set of updates.
So if you're never restarting it, the computer may eventually prompt you to
restart saying that it's been a while, we're gonna force you to restart. So you
get a schedule a time. Especially with Windows 10, they're pretty good about that.
But the thing is, if you're waiting for that to happen, you're already a bit
too far behind. So the next time you turn it back on, you'd have to force it to go
checking for updates, and then reboot the computer, go back to check for updates
again, and repeat that process over and over until there's no more updates remaining.
You might be thinking, well with the updates part of it, who cares?
I got a good antivirus, firewall, why should I care about that. Well an
antivirus / firewall are useless when it comes to hackers. They're looking at
vulnerabilities in the programs that they can exploit and then from their
gain access to your computer. So the vulnerabilities are patched with updates.
Like Windows updates and other program updates for the various programs that
you have installed in your computer. That's why you need to check for updates
regularly, on all the programs, not just the operating system, and rebooting the
computer, so it has a chance to make sure all those updates are applied properly
and it's ready to check and install additional updates.
Quick poll here. How often do you shut down your computer? Let me know in the
comments below. So in conclusion, I basically recommend that you shut the
computer off at the end of every day. You're saving on wear and tear on the
computer, if there's any power blips, power surges, anything like that, you're
gonna be less at risk with the computer crashing or getting additional damage done to it.
Nobody can hack into your computer when it's off.
You're making sure that it's doing a reboot with the shutdown.
So it's applying updates, and it's also doing the POST to check the hardware
when it first turns on. So unless you have a need to have the computer left on
overnight where you're doing a very lengthy download or upload, or you have
something else running that you'd need to keep on for the next day, or maybe you
remotely access your computer; so you need to have it left on 24/7, then in a
case like that, you can leave the computer on 24/7,
because you have a need for it.
But get in a habit to schedule a reboot
at least once a week. Ideally twice a week, so that it has a
chance to check for other updates, apply them, and get ready to download the next set.
So that's it for this video. Thanks so much for staying through to the end.
Give it a thumbs up if you haven't already, subscribe if you haven't.
It really helps me to continue to make more these tutorials for you guys.
Alright, thanks so much and we'll the next one. Bye for now.