I have a i5-2500K and it has been going strong for over 10 years now. The only time that I shut it down is when I clean the computer once a month. It still looks brand new to this day

Pro electronics repair tech here. The info about electrolytic capacitors was well-explained, but it should be emphasized that heat is the thing that kills caps the quickest, whether cheap ones or good ones. Leaving your computer on but idle generates little heat, but leaving it on while it's maxed out (crypto mining, running distributed computing apps, or video/3D rendering) can expose the caps on all the boards to more heat than usual. This is part of why good case ventilation is key. And yes, solid electrolytics are much preferable to old-style liquid electrolytics, as they're more heat resistant and they perform better even when brand-new. Great video! Edit: The reason liquid caps are used in power supplies is that solid caps of the needed capacities and voltage ratings would not fit in the allotted space, and would be prohibitively expensive.

Story time: my friend's dad runs a pizza restaurant and has 4 PC's to run the registers and stuff. There is only one spot in the entire kitchen they can go where there's an accessible outlet and there bluetooth is in range to keep the registers running, anywhere else they can't power them without tripping on a power cable or the registers' proximity alarms go off when they're farther than 7 feet from the machines. These PC's are right next to the oven. The oven exhaust vent. On the floor. They also haven't been turned off in years, the longest running one has an uptime of 4 years and not a single stick of ECC RAM. There is no ending, this crime is still ongoing. Nothing has gone wrong yet. YET.

this is very hardware-focused, i wouldve liked to hear about reloading drivers, clearing cache and tmp, and other things that could corrupt an os if left on for a rly long time

After like 5-6 years of almost continuous use my old cheap monitor died. I looked inside it and replaced a bulging cap in the power stage. Now its been running for another 4 years and counting. :)

I currently use my gaming laptop as a headless game streaming server, hidden in the closet under the stairs. It’s on 24/7 and works beautifully, but I should probably disconnect the battery before it explodes from abuse and sets the house on fire

For most consumers that don't need remote access or use their PC for work, I cannot see why you would leave it on all the time. SSDs have reduced startup to seconds, so shutting down isn't likely to affect anything. The power draw from the wall and higher energy bill should be reason enough to shut it down.

I have always had my computers that i actively use on 24/7 since late 90s and none of them failed. The only ones that well died was those in storage switched off for years. Hard drives as well I have found last longer when they run 24/7 compared to being power cycled all the time. I also do the same with my hi-fi equipment and have had same experience. I am now currently using a kenwood ka-6100 amplifier from the 1960s and it has not been switched off for years with exception of power outages or when moving it and it still works perfectly even though it has all original caps.

Fun fact: Hard drives typically have a longer lifespan when in continuous operation (assuming you disable the park setting). Spinning up and down is pretty tough on ye ol' spinning rust.

The reason I turn my computer off at night, or if I'm going away for more than a couple of hours, was not so much about worrying about the components but about the electricity consumption, both electric bill wise and environmentally. Otherwise I just put it to sleep.

I think it really depends on the build and how well you cool your rig. Have my I7-7700 1080ti 11g on pretty much 24/7 running heavy VR loads/video/graphical rendering/recording pretty much all my games. Still benchmarks just under what it did 5 years ago.

Been running my Mac Pro from 2009 24/7 for a long time now, sits there mining all the time now when I'm not using it and the only issue is the amount of dust it gets inside from it. And it's been heavily upgraded to still be useful in 2022, even if it's still a beastly 12 core machine...

Me: *Never turn off my computer* My computer: *You won’t let me live. You won’t let me die.*

I would like to add that having it 24/7 can have some long term software performance problems due to temporary files, cache data... This can be easily correct restarting it each several time, but it has not the top performance during all the time until you restart it.

I've generally kept my systems running 24/7 since I got my first 8088 machine. In the pre-2000 days, it was generally considered good practice and would prolong machine life, as power-cycling older components could introduce more wear-and-tear than just leaving it on all the time. After the early part of this century, however, this had pretty much ceased to be a concern and powering down and then on again as often as you wished wasn't a huge problem. But I left mine on all the time more or less out of habit. These days, now that I work from home exclusively, I'll often have jobs that run overnight anyway, so again my systems stay on all the time. I just have to remember to replace my HDDs from time to time. 😋

15 years, holy cow. Also, SMART isn't always going to alert you to an issue, drives can easily die without warning. However, it's a great tool and I definitely recommend keeping an eye on the stats.

I work in a DC for Americas largest bank and we still have some "Compaq Proliant ML370 G1's" in use. Circa 2002. Still with the original 9.1GB hard drives. So 20yrs old and still going strong.

I have a monitor that I bought when Circuit City was closing, and it's still running strong! It's my second monitor now since I finally bought a second display last year.

In my experience, you don't really need to worry about turning off your monitors as your pc will automatically stop sending signal to them after a certain time of being idle, which will quickly trigger the monitor's low power mode with the display off. But if you have a program preventing it or disabled that setting, then yeah turn them off if you're not going to be using it for a long time

I am always paranoid my cooling loop - knowing that I put it together - is gonna spring a leak. I like leaving it on sometimes so I can remote in but it’s always in the back of my head!

I have a Maxtor with over 9 years of uptime recorded in SMART, its a minor miracle it still works. I have it simply to see how long it lasts now, i don't use it for storing anything i car about. One thing I am curious about, I believe that for a HDD, the start up routine is the most stressful for it, when its suddenly dumped with electric and told to start doing things, so I wonder if in this regard, it is kinder on them to keep them constantly running, rather than lots of start ups on them?

I've had 4 PCs in a row that went 7 years each before i replaced them. mostly due to software issues (windows fighting with drivers, causing various issues. Basically components becoming outdated is a major issue. Except in one case where the heat sink on the CPU got clogged with dust bunnies-back in the early pentium era where they had large attached heat sinks and a small fan-and the CPU fan melted off). I've only had to replace things like a graphics card once, and RAM 1-2 times. And i run my systems nearly 24/7, because i spend so much time on them and don't often sleep long so i want to be able to just get on and get back to doing stuff instead of waiting for it to boot up. Plus want to be able to hear notification sounds if anyone tries to contact me when i'm afk

What about the expanding and contracting of parts with the heat when you turn off and on your computer? If its on all the time that does not happen since the computer is always warm

I run my desktop 24/7. It's way over 10 years old. I replaced the original hard drive in it a couple of years ago with an SSD. I built the computer myself and bought top of the line parts at the time. It still does everything I want it to. It can do a lot of things at once, such as download large files, play music, and write documents. I keep it on 24/7 because I do have things going on occasionally that need all night to accomplish. For example, copying a major amount of files from an older drive to a newer replacement takes over a day, because it involves terabytes of data. Also, I sometimes download files from Usenet and many times have days of downloads queued up. Additionally, I like to just go to the computer any time, day or night, and work without having to wait for the computer to boot up. I don't know if it still applies, but I had heard years ago that powering up a computer put heat stress on some parts, shortening their life. So I just let it run. It still looks brand new, as I clean it often.

What typically break components and electronics usually isn't really dust or running the PC hot all the time but rather the difference or change of temperature the electronics go througth. Microsolders are made of metal and metal doesn't like having large difference of temperature getting quickly applied to it, it ends up breaking and in electronics, it means connections are not doing their job anymore and the electronic in question ends up not working. Dust simply exacerbate this process where the heat transfert cannot be done as efficient as before and prevent the ventillation to be as good or as designed. 😊 Where an PC idling is most likely to be within a similar temperature to if it was off.

What about the operating system? The longer windows is turned on, the more strange bugs start to happen. A daily restart is really helpful for the OS.

I run a little radio station and I use an old Core 2 Duo PC to play all of our audio and music 24/7. I only replaced the PSU since it had few bloated capacitor and I clean it for once in a while. But with all of that it runs perfectly. It's common for radio stations that have PC's that run 24/7 because their automation system is vital to run and broadcast content.

This show was excellent. I have a Dell Inspiron, an all-in-one microcomputer. I shut it down when not in use for long periods of time with Microsoft Windows 10 Professional. I never press the power switch without selecting the shut down selection in the software. It is nice to learn something else about hardware just as I am learning more about software.

My oldest hard drive has been running for like 10 years. Still working. Only has reallocated sectors as an issue. It's a 5400 RPM Seagate Momentum plus I suppose. Also all my laptops are still running on 5400 RPM Hard Drives. SSDs keep getting expensive in my country because importing them are banned

the key to extending your components' lifespan is maintaining a constant temperature. the more the temperature fluctuates, the more problems you're gonna have. something something thermal expansion

I’ve always had at least one of my computers on for the last 30 years or more and always have had separate servers for different tasks. One for torrenting, one for streaming and one for file serving has been my setup for a decade, until now that I’m trying using only one for those tasks. I’m still not convinced about it but at least I’m saving power and generating less heat as this spring we’re having never higher temperatures than ever before. In fact my servers are my decommissioned workstations, so they are usually heavily used before turning them into servers. With proper maintenance, you can extend their life well beyond the ten year mark.

Another great video by James! And this topic is specially of interest for me as I have not shut down my computer since 2012!

It was a great video, thanks, James! I was wondering, could you make a video about laptops. Should I put it in sleep mode at night, or should I turn it off completely?

You dont have to keep it running for remote access, you can use wake on lan if it supports it

Over 10 years ago I worked for the Los Angeles DWP at Scattergood Generating Station, which was a natural gas power plant. At this stations we had old units that had some computers added to them and a general purpose email computer. These computers were only turned off if they failed and needed repair, otherwise they were on all the time. With two of these computers the first thing to fail was the spinning platter Hard Disk Drives. Also our Instrument Shop had to occasionally clean out all the dirt and dust that accumulated in these computers, this was another time that they were turned off.

Fans are made to be replaced, and they're fairly easy to replace. I've replaced a few fans on various computers over the years. I've also replaced the HD on a couple machines, although I was able to keep an old HD running years after it failed the SMART test. Although I mainly leave my computer running overnight because it takes a while to start up.

This is kind of a funny coincidence---I just had a case fan start making weird-ass squeaky/grindy noises this morning... luckily it's nothing mission-critical

In my 20 years of computer experience, you're much more likely to have a problem when turning a computer on than if you just leave it on all the time. Most serious problems show themselves at startup.

So I've had my PC for 11 years now, and it's been running basically 24/7 for all this time, monitors included, apart from a week here or there when I was on vacation. Most everything still works. One thing failed - AIO, and it required replacing. Also I'd be nice to replace the fans too - they're still working just fine but have become slightly louder probably because the bearings are failing.

One thing I didn't her you mention is Sleep mode. It's enabled on my desktop and powers down the system when it hasn't been used in a certain amount of time, and will quickly resume if the keyboard or mouse is touched. It also allows t he middle of the night automatic updates. The display also goes into sleep mode and will reawaken when it receives a signal from the computer. My understanding is that minimal power is required during this time. I would think this extends the life of the computer as well without having to completely shut it off.

I heard lots of stories from people experienced and it also happened to me as well: When the time comes, 9 out of 10 times, you shut down a working computer and it never boots again. That's usually how a computer dies due to age if not user's fault like liquid damage or dropping etc. If a PC living down the stretch and you don't know when it's gonna die (usually happens about 10+ years old PCs or 6+ years laptops) it's usually better to not shut down because you can't be sure if it's ever gonna boot again.

I work in tech repair, and we had a customer come in this week with problems of apps not starting, apps freezing, and apps stalling. A reboot fixed all of these issues. It turns out they had never powered off their laptop in the 3+ years they'd had it. I don't know what, internally, causes something like this to happen. My gut says either the RAM or SSD index got corrupted from wear-and-tear, and rebooting rebuilt it enough for things to work again. I don't know, though.

Don’t forget about the liquid cooler pumps, curious on your take of life of those.

Usually i leave my computer in sleep mode, I have a slow compuyer and it takes FOREVER to boot. I do restart about every week for updates or to just clear temp files on that.

Oldest part in my current PC is 7 years, the harddrive. Still spins, still functions, but you can feel it's age creeping in, feels more like the motor that spins it will go before the plates though.

0:43 Even less than 3 months. Back then I was an IT service technician, we often found motherboards and PC power supplies with dry capacitors. The worst of all were companies like Dell and HP which blamed the damage on the user ("misuse") and did not honor the warranty, customers had to pay for the repair, often multiple times!

The only time i shut down/restart is when performance starts dropping (from i assume caching) otherwise to save power i still use the hibernate function (i have an ssd so startup times are negligible either way). Another cool feature of hibernate is you can unplug your pc, move it around and when you start it up again youre back where you left off, as it actually powers off while the sleep function still uses power. not sure the max time this works for, ive had it intercity for about 6 hours but can be a lot slower on hdd pc's from the caching...

Over my years, all the PCS that I leave on 24/7 has lasted for well over a decade and still going. The ones that turn off are usually replaced within 3-4 years if not sooner due to hardware issues.

I usually just put my pc to sleep when I'm away, and do a full power cycle every week or so. I feel like that's pretty optimal for the lifespan without having to spend any time on it.

My parents had a 2005-or-6 eMachines computer that we pretty much left in hibernate mode whenever we weren't using it, just so we wouldn't have to deal with long warm-up times. Actually, the weird part was it took longer for the computer to warm up when we shut down the computer and flipped the switch on the surge protector than it did if we just turned the computer off.

I keep mine on over night and if I'm at home during the day too, when there has been a lot of rain. Keeps the moister/humidity in the air out of the computer. This is especially important if you have issues with dust. I've had a power supply blow up because of extreme humidity from rain and dust in the power supply. Luckily it didn't take anything out, when it blew. Also we see lots of parts in machinery go kaboom in factories because of the exact same reason. Especially if the machine has been standing a few days. Around here some of the factories don't clean thier machines in side at all till something goes wrong, or don't clean it regularly enough. I've had times where I've had to dig out fans with a skrewdriver. Add that with humidity from hot day after the rains or a hot rainy day and the fun begins.

Maybe I would suggest to look at this software wise. Imagine the clogged RAM when you leave your PC on too long. It got better the last 10 years ... but restarting will give you a small performance boost after long power on time :)

I havent turned any of my computers off since 2001

@ltt: when I was a kid at school the had an exercise bike hooked up to a light bulb switch board that had a power output reader. They showed us what it was like to produce xyz amounts of power by switching on the light bulbs while you rode it, and it was really eye opening to see what it would be like to run a 400 watt cpu. maybe you should do a video like that to make the audience appreciate power and how far we have come.. and what might be plausible in the future.

I own a dell latitude e6500 from 2008 and for the past 4 years has been on as a print server, the usage is so light that it doesnt even turn on the cooler (only when I run a full system upgrade) had only to replace thermal paste and brush it off battery is fine as well as you can disable the charging without having to remove it from the system

Back when I used an XP machine, it would start glitching if it remained on for too long. Usually 16 hours to 2 days. Hardware was fine though, the software was the issue. Nowadays it's much more stable. I've left Windows 10 running for days on accident without problems, so the only issue now is the electricity bill. On a side note, my phone would lose the ability to connect to wifi if left on for a month, but a quick restart fixes it every time.

Techquickie: What If You Never Turn Off Your Computer? Power Company: 👍👍👍

I'm kind of surprised one of the components listed to go bad wasn't water pumps/AIO pumps. I built a PC about 3 years ago with a Corsair AIO and it's still going strong, but that's the first thing I worry about going out.

Still using the same PC that I built over 10 years ago. The only thing that started dying was the stock fans that came with the case. Sleeve bearing fans will usually make an audible grinding noise at cold boot, and that's a good indicator that they're on their way out. Every other pivotal component, even HDDs are still operating as normal.

I have two generic desktops (running Linux). They have been powered on almost continuously for 12 and 14 years.

The weirdest thing about capacitors is they were never talked about as cylindrical electricity containers in high school physics. It was always flat metallic rectangular plates facing each other, sometimes with a dielectric slab in between, that we had to find the capacitance of

Yess!! Monitor lifespan video please! Also include CRTs! As for this video, awesome, I love stuff like this- lifespan!!

I have a system with an i7 4790k, and at longest I had it on for over 500 days, and routinely kept it going for over 200 days. It still works fine to this day and the mobo caps and VRMs are all still going quite well.

I've had my computer for almost 10 years now and I leave it on. Anecdotal experience for sure but I've only had one HDD die... it was a Seagate. (Yes I have a 10 year old HDD in my computer, yes it's backed up.) Crystal disk info says it has over 25000 power on hours and 2500 power cycles. Edit: Oops I was looking at my SSD my actual HDD has 69999 (nice) hours exactly and 4696 power cycles.

5 years for HDD? Woopsies, my "youngest" one is around7 years now of continuous use 😅

you can just run a program like msi afterburner that can be setup to shutdown the pc if it detects a fan going to 0. It's in the alarm section. And under the run application. And 'shutdown' is an option in there. Can also set it to trigger on temps as well. Or any number of other events.

I would assume other OSs have this option, but i know Windows has power settings for your hard drives. You can set it so that they turn off after X minutes without use, which is what I do since I tend to keep things that I use often on SSD.

It's also worth pointing out that leaving your computer running can result in slow downs. Especially if you have programs like web browsers running. They just eat up all your system resources, and the entire system starts to chug. Just shut down your computer when you're not using it. It's not hard, and if you have a fast SSD, it doesn't take long to boot up. Just do it.

Would love to hear the opposing side, are there any downsides to turning your computer off every night? Or there are none?

Only issue I ever had while having PC turned on for prolonged times was the SATA power cable short-circuited and started melting the plastic insulator, making a bit of smoke. Luckily someone else was in the room and turned off the PC before it got too serious. Cable was around 6-7 years old and luckily, it didn't damage any other components.

I've had my desktop PC running 24/7 for 8 years continously and it's still working great, I clean the insides out every 1 to 2 years and redo the thermal paste when I clean it out, it doesn't get that dusty, it still works like it did when it was new

You end up with a nice surprise when the electricity bill comes through the post

ive left my pc on for about 8 years nonstop, never had a problem, you should see how many hours my original 2tb hard drive from when i was 14 has, its insane how many hrs it has and still perfectly good

I just upgraded my previous computer (a Shuttle XPC with an i7) after 7.5 years, which I left on for about 7 years worth of that time. My SSD was the first thing to expire- too many write cycles, catastrophic failure. After replacing that SSD with another, that computer lives on as the kids' homeschool classroom computer. I make sure to set my computers to sleep overnight now, which has also been saving a surprising amount of power.

Temperature fluctuations caused by powering your pc off and on daily causes expansion and contraction of components that will decrease their lifespan. An old electronics engineer explained this to me and it seems to hold true throughout the 20 plus years of my professional experience. Leave it on and perform reboots once a week to keep the OS updated and you'll have less issues all around.

Every high school English teacher.

Reminds me of how, when I was younger, I thought restarting your computer meant factory resetting it. Jesus I was dumb lol

I remember "back in the day," one of the claims made was the heating and cooling cycles could cause the solder to crack. Handling PCB's everyday at work the solder on modern boards is much better (lead free sucks, flows like crap) but I really don't see that as much of this happening today. But I still remember the church I went to keeping their Packard Bell on all the time.

please make a video about monitors lifespan as early as you can and also about why do vertical lines appear on a monitor.

*windows forced update/restarts* Let me help you with that!

While I do turn off my gaming rig when not using it, I never turn off my media PC... cuz I'm always using it. Forced windows updates are pretty much the only time it ever sees a restart too.

My other problem is our rented house were sensitive to thunder and trip suddenly. So yeah, on and off is a daily thing. Plus the need to save the bill is kinda priority too. I'm still saving for good ups as I don't has one. I pray that my setup lasts longer than a decade. Man, making money grow on trees is hard!

My parents had a really old macintosh, I think it was from the very late 80's and they left it on every day, every night for almost 16 years before they finally got a windows 2000 pc

It literally takes less than 5 seconds to boot. Why do people not shut down their PCs unless there's a task that requires completion running?

Thermal cycling will age certain electronic components faster than continuous use if the components experience large differences in temperature between when they are in use and when they are turned off. This is particularly imporrtant for cponents that are normally operating near the high end of their operation temperature range.

I've been using a hard drive as backup storage since I got my first prebuilt 13 years ago, I have an m.2 for boot and ssd for main storage but for very large files besides certain games I want on either m.2 or the ssd I throw on my hard drive and still haven't had issues with it.

Lol I’ve just turned my pc off after it’s been on the past week and a half, let’s see if I was right or not to do so

lmao imagine leaving your pc on while not using it. Prolly kids that don't pay for their power bills.

For remote access you could also setup the wake on lan

was expecting a section about added wear and tear from heating up and cooling down multiple times a day if you turn your computer on and off often vs. leaving it running idle

i have two case fans from an Aerocool case. They look bad and have those crappy LEDs that are visible from each corner. I got them in 2010 and they still run in my daughter's PC while the case they came from is gathering dust in storage (it's a great case, with removable 5.25 bay mesh segments, but the side panel was acrylic and scratched like heck now).

Since many many windows versions ago when you click on shut down it doesn't actually shut down your computer... can actually just goes into a hybrid sleep mode. The only way to actually shut it down in the sense of removing power from all the components on the board is to do a restart or pull the power plug. If you install a program and it tells you need to restart the computer and you decide to do a full shutdown and then press the power button to turn it back on the program won't work properly because the computer didn't actually shut down... It just went into that hybrid sleep mode.

getting that dust off those DDR2 OCZ Dimms. Oh nostalgia~

I think AIO pumps dying is something to consider too, you'll realistically have no idea (if there aren't any sensors) apart from it being slightly quieter and your cpu/gpu overheating quite a bit!

Ooo I would definitely like to see the same video but for monitors like James teased us with at the end there

always powered on with sleep mode active is the way to go. best of both worlds: draws very little power and preserves components, and can start back up in an instant even via network.

I've had at least one PC on 24/7 ever since I switched to Linux in 2002 - there's the remote connecting and access to all the data on my file server (which is optionally a second desktop PC on my home LAN, but usually the same machine I use as my main desktop) from wherever I happen to be - SSH, and if needed, a remote X session or VNC to my current desktop session tunneled through that SSH connection. But there's also the fact that I like to have multiple different things I'm working on open at same time, so I can instantly switch to whatever I'd like to do. I like to keep my most used applications open and ready, and I don't like reloading all the stuff required when I want to switch to a software development project, elecrtronic music project or just my KZfaq session. Even my laptop is on 24/7, at least in theory. I only do a complete reboot when the kernel has been upgraded - and usually after a while, because I don't like to close up everything. In practise it's in sleep mode (suspended to RAM) most of the time it's in my bag or simply not connected to AC and used at the moment. If the battery gets too low I hibernate the system (suspend to disk), and shut it down. But I don't consider it a reboot in this context, as it will read the state of the system from disk to RAM and continue right where I left it. I've only have had caps go bad in one computer so far. It was the one I bought in 2002 when switching to Linux, and it was only 2 or 3 years old at the time - I've had PC's easily last 5 years, many even 10 years of active use without them caps going bad. I don't know if I've just been lucky, especially as I've gotten all my computer since used - it was the last PC I bought as new.

My PC from 2002 is always on and still running fine, only thing I changed was the 7970 for a 980 ti a bunch of years ago. Still using it every day.

One thing I don’t see a lot of people mentioning in here is the HEAT it pumps into your room. I was in a door room last semester and my roommate had his big full tower Corsair case with 3 exhausts fans running constantly with all his programs open. I’d come back at night sometimes and get hit with a warm humid wave of air walking in. Between the sleeping area room and the room we had our PCs in there was noticeable 3-4 degrees temp diff. So yeah if your room is cold in the winter just keep your pc running with a decent amount of programs open. It’ll heat the room right up lmao.

thank you, I found this very informative