ele life

This depends a lot on the type of equipment. Is it ALL electronic? Electro-mechanical components? The latter usually do have a mechanical wear mode. Disk drives (depending on the power saving settings) continue to rotate. Printers usually do not work mechanically when on, unless actually printing.

Depends on temperature design of systems. High temps speed up failure rate, but if temp not far from room temp this is not a problem. If equipment runs hot, it IS.

That's why I specified.

HDD in standby supposedly does not spin, but I have no way of confirming that.

Monitor standby is powerdown, but the switch is still depressed and it blinks its LED. So is it really off?

The boards are still powered, I think in standby. The cpu fun keeps spinning.

minimal climate control here. Often in lower 80s°F in summer and sometimes hotter. CPU will power down if temperature goes over a preset limit.

You should be able to hear it, especially when it needs to spin back up.

Part of it is on. The high voltage of a CRT, and the backlights on an LCD would be turned off. Even an LCD usually gets pretty warm with the drive chips and backlight on, so if it has been off a while the temp difference should be obvious.

Depends on the flavor of standby. On some systems it is settable as to how far "down" it goes.

Jon

To switch it off will save significant power and I think it will probably not shorten the life, and will quite likely extend it. When the components are hot, they age faster (especially electromigration in the metal tracks on ICs etc.) When not in use overnight, if you unplug the whole system from the power and also disconnect the phone line then you will greatly reduce the chance of the computer being damaged by lightning too. In some locations, that could significantly increase the life expectancy of the PC. You would also eliminate the chance that the computer could cause a fire to start, not that this is very likely in the first place.

In most cases the PC will become obsolete before it wears out anyway, whatever the effect of leaving it on or off, so you might as well save as much power as you can by switching it off when it is unused for more than a few hours.

Chris

win help says that standby powers down the HDD, but I can not hear a difference.

de-spinning the HD is not usually noticeable. Spin-up is not always audible. The several seconds delay for a full spin up is. The biggest savings come from shutting off the CRT (blanking, then stopping the scanning) the next best savings come from de-clocking the CPU.

I hear mine shutting down and and have to wait for them to start back up, yours probably do too if you have that feature enabled.

the parts that use most of the electricity are off.