Why are you supposed to reboot your windows PC every 3/4 days?

Question

Also, which is more energy efficient, leaving it on all the time or keeping it in hibernate or standby?

Answer 1

Leaving it in hiberate is a really good idea, since the computer is actually off. Standby and hiberate are two different things, as putting the computer in standby usually turns off the hard drive and the monitor to save some power, but the computer is still on. Putting the computer in hibernate saves everything in the RAM to the hard drive and shuts the computer down. Once you turn the computer back on, the contents of the memory are restored and the computer is as you left it.

Answer 2

Some people will tell you that is is actually better to not reboot, just put it in stand-by mode, as rebooting wears out your hard drive and power supply unit. Poppy-cock. When you are done with your computer for the day, or are going to be away from it for several hours, shut it down. I say that for a couple of reasons.

First, Windows has always had a memory leak issue, wherein the longer you leave a Windows operating system running, the slower it performs (worlds touched on this earlier). So, to get a clean memory and faster performance, you must do a "cold" boot up. This means you must shut down the system for at least 90 seconds or more, then power it back up. You will NOT wear out your hard drive or power supply doing this, unless you do it an awfully lot--say 10-20 times a day, 7 days a week. Hard drives fail mostly because people don't do simple stuff like defrags and scandisks, and antivirus. Power supply units fail mostly due to dust accumulation.

Secondly, the computer uses a lot of energy when it is hibernating. It is constantly supplying the hard drive and other components with enough juice to snap instantly on when prompted, as well as the monitor, which uses a huge amount of energy all on it's own.

People who say it's harder on it to start it up, and uses more energy, probably think it's cheaper and better for your car to let it run in the parking lot of the mall while you shop than to shut it off and restart it later. It's not true for your car, and it's not true for your computer. I have a computer I bought in 1999 that has seen heavy use as a gaming rig and internet machine daily, and I have cold booted it several (2-3) times a day for all that time. I have had not a single issue with the hard drive or power supply, nor anything else for that matter. I have faithfully performed scandisks and defrags, and blown the dust out of the cpu unit. This computer runs like a top. It's all in the maintenance.

To sum up--hibernate or standby for long periods of time, not so good. Shut down and reboot if away for more than an hour or two. Long answer, I know, but I wanted to be clear.

Answer 3

I have been told to reboot every few days, because the booting process actually checks for problems and cleans itself out a little. Some of these things don't happen when your PC just hibernates. BTW, setting the pc to hibernate after about an hour is the most energy efficient. But you still want to reboot every few days.

Answer 4

first of all, i never heard that you had to reboot windows every 3 to 4 days?? second, the most energy efficient would be probably to keep it in hibernate or standby. I turn my PC off at night.

Answer 5

Windows is simply an inefficient operating system, full of crap that Microsoft commandeered from third-party developers. Instead of just making a terrific efficient OS, Bill bought up most of the good add-on feature software and included it into the OS. So we are left with an OS that neither cleans itself up, nor releases now-unused resources back to itself for re-use.

The only way to do this is to reboot and let the hardware re-initialize and reload the OS.

I shut down my computer every night.

Answer 6

Mine runs 24/7, reboot maybe twice per year for major software updates...

Oh, you're probably running Windows. If you run your system clean, and only put quality software on it, I think even Windows could run longer than that.

What others have said about not releasing memory and other resources may be true, but the important thing is a good OS shouldn't have those problems.

Answer 7

hibernate/standby only decreases energy usage slightly!
PCs are kinda like people. if u get a guy to work for many hours straight with minimal rest, wont there be a point when his productivity falters?
machines are kinda like that too. rebooot so it gets a chance to rejuvenate. besides, if its kept too long, it may have errors, and some errors are a biatch to fix. may as well avoid them totally by rebooting

Answer 8

im pretty sure that a box running 2000/XP can run alot longer than 3/4 days. My computer was on for 22 days stright. No crashes and no abnormal performance issues.

I have my computer on weeks at a time. The only thing that causes me to restart is program installations that require restarts..

Answer 9

Greetings!

Each time a command is sent to the processor it uses a thread to hold a place on it. Even if you shut the program down the thread remains, sort of like a cache, if you will.
The only way the processor will release them is to turn the computer off, denying the processor electrical current.
Not doing so will slow the machine down and create memory faults.

Good Luck

Answer 10

basically what he means is that the longer u keep ur pc on the more ur using ur memory, and if u keep t on too long your ram will become corrupt, the normal times u need to reboot is like 1 every 3days or so.