You know that you can schedule your mac when to power up and shut down? I set mine to power off a few min after I leave for work and power back on right before I get home. You can make up different schedules for your comp for your own sleep/ wake up time.
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How often do you turn off your iMac
- Thread starter DTMfan
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You know that you can schedule your mac when to power up and shut down? I set mine to power off a few min after I leave for work and power back on right before I get home. You can make up different schedules for your comp for your own sleep/ wake up time.
Complete nonsense and pseudo science.
When you turn it off you use ZERO electricity. When you boot up from sleep the hard drive spins up just like from cold boot.
The only reason to let it sleep is for handiness. It is not more eco friendly period.
Mine stays on unless the power goes out, stays out for a while, and the UPS preference gracefully shuts it down.
I don't know if this is myth or based on old technology, but people used to leave computers on because there was thought to be stress to the power surge of being turned on and booted that they wanted to avoid. So I was always told to sleep my computer when I was going to use it again within 24 hours. I remember this even during the days of screen savers when the computer wouldn't really go to sleep.
There is some truth to this in that things like a light bulb will often burn out under the stress of being turned on, but once on a bulb is on it will rarely burn out. (Not suggesting you will save money running your bulbs 24/7, but just that this is a visible example of the negative effect of a power surge that we are all used to seeing.)
Anyway, I leave my computer in sleep unless I will be gone for longer than 24 hours. 1.25 W is pretty minor usage. Swapping one 60 W bulb for one of those low energy bulb makes up for any power saving I could achieve by turning off my iMac. And I've got a bunch of those low energy bulbs installed in my house. So I'm good.
There is some truth to this in that things like a light bulb will often burn out under the stress of being turned on, but once on a bulb is on it will rarely burn out. (Not suggesting you will save money running your bulbs 24/7, but just that this is a visible example of the negative effect of a power surge that we are all used to seeing.)
Anyway, I leave my computer in sleep unless I will be gone for longer than 24 hours. 1.25 W is pretty minor usage. Swapping one 60 W bulb for one of those low energy bulb makes up for any power saving I could achieve by turning off my iMac. And I've got a bunch of those low energy bulbs installed in my house. So I'm good.
I almost never turn of any of my computers including my iMac. I do however put them to sleep when I'm not using them. The only time I power them down is when I'm not going to be home for a couple of days..
I dont turn off any of my computers unless i'm leaving them for more than a week.. mainly as sod the planet, I need to be able to remote in to my desktop from anywhere to get work done. This applies to both my Mac Pro (Only turned it off twice and those have been because I have been out of the country for a week+) and my iMac (Only turned off, well, very occasionally as it acts as my media server and gateway into my home file storage). Not eco-friendly, but I do get 45% of my electricity from green sources - so I just count it as being part of that.
(pc user . . . soon to be 1st time owner of an iMac soon) with a question:
PC's have a "sleep" and "hibernate" mode. Do iMacs/Macs have something similar to this or is "sleep" the only mode other than powering off completely?
PC's have a "sleep" and "hibernate" mode. Do iMacs/Macs have something similar to this or is "sleep" the only mode other than powering off completely?
I turn my computer off probably four or five times a day. If I'm going to be away from it for more than 20 minutes it gets turned off (though dual SSD's make rebooting very quick). I have also just added a power strip that automatically cuts power to everything when my computer is turned off by reading the dramatic decrease in power usage.
With the computer set to turn on after a power failure. Which the strip cutting power registers as. I just have to click any button on any infrared remote and the strip sends power again. Causing my computer to boot and everything to fire up.
I don't do it to be "green". I just don't see the point in wasting money on electricity that I am not using.
Every computer I have owned since 1993 was turned off every day. None of them ever died prematurely. Heck even when I was a little kid my fathers 286 AST bought in either 1986 or 1987 was turned off everyday and he used that for 8 years. This was when no one bothered shutting down, you just quite your programs and flipped the power switch.
Actually I'm not sure if DOS 3 even had a shutdown command.
With the computer set to turn on after a power failure. Which the strip cutting power registers as. I just have to click any button on any infrared remote and the strip sends power again. Causing my computer to boot and everything to fire up.
I don't do it to be "green". I just don't see the point in wasting money on electricity that I am not using.
Every computer I have owned since 1993 was turned off every day. None of them ever died prematurely. Heck even when I was a little kid my fathers 286 AST bought in either 1986 or 1987 was turned off everyday and he used that for 8 years. This was when no one bothered shutting down, you just quite your programs and flipped the power switch.
Actually I'm not sure if DOS 3 even had a shutdown command
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Yes, I do know that thanks
I could set mine to wake up early, I might do that I had it doing that at one point Although, I didn't know you could power it off. That's interesting.
You are wrong about that. It is something I learned 20 years ago from my best friend who's an electrical engineer: turning things on and off is a lot worse than keeping things running. That's why there's a sleep mode. Notice how regular light bulbs burn out when you turn the lights on.
Absolutely correct! Continuous switching on and off places extreme power surge stresses on components such as the smoothing capacitors in any electronic equipment's power supply, thereby reducing its useful life. Evidence the large amount of equipment, such as TV's and DVD Players, that are designed to run on "standby mode" when not in use - many have dispensed with the on/off switch altogether.
Yes they do, and it is configurable, but only from the command line. iMacs use sleep (a small amount of power is used to keep the memory refreshed). MacBooks by default use a combination of hibernate and sleep, called "safe sleep" -- when put into sleep state it also saves its state to disk, like hibernate, so if the battery runs out while sleeping you can still recover by recharging and then turning the computer back on. Straight hibernation is also possible. Google "hibernatemode"
And addressing the OP's query, all our desktop Macs (2 iMacs and 3 minis) but one are left on all the time but sleep when not in use. The server mini is set to never sleep.