Laptop on all the time

[Lowri]

My sister uses a laptop at her desk and never ever turns it off. The display never goes into standby either. She likes to just sit down and begin immediately whenever she feels like it.
Apart from energy wastage which is bad enough, is she shortening the life of the machine by doing this?

[Beswad]

Unless your sister's laptop has a SSD the normal hard drive always spinning. I would imagine it isn't good for the bearings in the hard drive.

[Beswad]

Also leaving the laptop on idle, the cooling fan will accumulate most dust than normal on/off usage and will result in bad vent for the laptop and you could work out what will happen soon.

[Lowri]

Shes such an airhead, I doubt she'll get it!

[ACtheTROLL]

actually ... servers are never switched off ... and will run for years .... and years ..... and years.... and years ..... and years.... and years ..... and years. without being switched off or restarted.

so the hardware argument doesn't stand up too well.

laptops have a "bulb" to illuminate the screen ... with an expected life of something like 100000 hours (about 11 years)

also screens don't burn theses days ... so that argument won't stand up either

windows isn't good at running constantly ... it should be rebooted every so often..

one side of the argument is that machines only fail when switched off .... (expansion and contraction of the components)

the real argument though (as you've identified) is that she's contributing to increasing the leccy bill ... and decreasing my, her and everyone else's life span by adding to global warming

logically there isn't much substance in the damaging her machine argument.

it sounds like her "pink" considerations outweigh any green ones

[MrBounty]

I've found that any machine i have to use / check / fix, which is on and has been for a while, runs like a crippled 90 year old - i.e. not very well.

If she keeps her laptop on all the time, it must be running very slow!!

If only to get better performance out of the machine, she should at least reboot it now and again....

[ChuckFickens]

I leave both mine on all the time, all I do shut the screen when not using them

hardware wise I have seen no ill effect (other than it knackered the battery on one of my very old ones, but that doesn't happen these days as the charger circuits are more intelligent )

My windows laptop does require a restart every week or so to keep it running smoothly, my Linux lappy has been running for several months now with no problems

incidentally the longest uptime I've ever seen was just short of 8years without a restart on a Linux mail server and it was still going strong.

[MrBounty]

That is very impressive....