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When to turn off equipment

"Pro" turning things off frequently:

Some people think it prolongs component life. Not everyone agrees.

It saves some electricity.

In a dusty computer room, if the equipment is off, the fans aren't sucking more dust into the machines' innards. "Dusty" does not have to be extreme, in everyday terms, to be damaging to the equipment. Dust degraded the effectiveness of heatsinks and jams fans. Heat is the prime killer of components, apart from exceptional spikes on the power line. Remember also that a chronic low level dust problem will quite quickly build up significant levels of dust where it can do harm.

If your equipment is online, the less time it is connected to the internet, the less time it is vulnerable to hackers.

"Con" turning things off frequently:

A properly configured machine will go into a power saving mode automatically after a reasonable delay.

Leaving systems powered up makes the spare processing power available to valuable distributed processing projects, such as the one looking for cancer cures.

Consider the costs: Twenty computers turned off for three hours between two teachers' use thereof: Electricity saving, what? £5/$10 (I'm being generous, I think! Cost to remember: The time of teacher and 20 pupils while computers shut down (Yes, you can probably hit "shut down" and leave, but...), AND the time of the teacher and 20 pupils while computers boot.

If you "buy" the "turn it off" argument: Are you also going to turn off all the little transformers converting the household 110/240v AC to the low voltage DC used by much computer equipment? How? Plug / unplug? Think of the wear and tear on the plugs, sockets, cables.

If your equipment is on a LAN, each time it is started up, the LAN is taxed with re-establishing connections, etc., especially if you use dynamic IP addresses.

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