Desktop PCs are like furniture. When it’s not in active use, your PC blend into the backgrounds into the background. Screensavers are thing of the past, but after a few minutes to hours, your monitor will go black and your PC will appear to be powered down.
This is great if you’ve only stepped outside to go to the store or if you want to be able to quickly resume work or play a game without having to wait for your Windows PC to wake up from a cold boot, but there are valid reasons why you should shut your PC down regularly and leave it powered off when not in use.
Shutting down your PC saves money
Power is money, and electricity isn’t cheap. While most household appliances have become more efficient and cheaper to run in recent years, desktop PCs have bucked the trend, and now demand more power than they ever did – especially if you have a high spec gaming PC.
Windows desktop computers typically draw between 250W and 1500W. If you leave your computer on for 24 hours per day, the total electricity cost will be between $350 and $2,600 (based on current electricity prices in New York ) .
This is not an insignificant amount of money. It’s money you could spend on food, on bills, on a used car, or even on a new gaming PC!
A laptop will usually require less power than a gaming PC, but taken over a year, you can make significant savings by shutting down your laptop.
If you shut down your computer when you’re not actively using it, you could save hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars.
Shutting down your PC improves performance
No operating system or app is perfect, and even Windows has inbuilt faults. One of these is in the way it deals with memory allocated to processes or programs which are not in use.
Often, these are not shut down correctly, and the memory allocated to them is not released. This means that there is less memory available to the rest of the system, and you may notice that your PC is running slower than it should be.
If you regularly shut down your Windows PC, these programs and processes are forced to stop, and when you reboot your PC, you will notice that it runs a lot better.
Shutting down your Windows computer makes it last longer.
It may not look that way, but PCs have some moving parts – these are mostly fans. Fans on your graphics cards, CPU fans, and fans in your Power Supply Unit (PSU). Higher end systems may also have pumps for liquid cooling.
Anything which contains moving parts wears out eventually, and the best outcome in this case is that you have to replace that part. If the parts of your PC which cool the rest of it wear out, it components can seriously overheat and become damaged – possibly meaning that you need to replace your entire PC.
In addition to moving parts, thermal paste – which conducts the heat generated by your CPU to the heatsink – can dry out over time. And think about that fancy RGB lighting setup – It’ll lock pretty dumb when half the LEDs are burned out.
Stop snoopers from spying on you by turning off your PC
Turning off your computer when you’re not using it has another advantage: If you’re not there to supervise access, other people can get into it, snoop into your business and personal life, and potentially steal your info. This can happen if you share your residence with other people, or if a third party breaks into your property.
Scheduling your Windows computer to shutdown is easy
You may be put off from shutting down your computer at the end of the day because it takes time to do. You want to grab a beer and go to bed without having to worry about closing tabs and terminating programs. We’ve already written about how to schedule shutdown on your Windows PC or laptop, follow our instructions once, and you won’t need to worry about shutting down your PC every night – Windows Task Scheduler will do it for you.