Is There Any Reason to Actually Shut Down Your Computer?

Is There Any Reason to Actually Shut Down Your Computer?

With low-control standby modes and stable working frameworks, its less demanding than at any other time in recent memory to go days (if not weeks or months) without rebooting your PC. Is it still important to perform a full close down? 

Today's Inquiry & Answer session comes to us civility of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Trade, a group driven gathering of Q&A site

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Is There Any Reason to Actually Shut Down Your Computer?

The Question

SuperUser reader JFW wants to know if he’s missing out on something important by not shutting down his computer completely:

Nowadays with our modern operating systems, is it necessary to fully shutdown computers instead of choosing to stand-by or hibernate computers (desktops and laptops)?

Would there be any side-effects of keeping a computer running continuously without a shutdown (putting it to sleep or hibernating it when it is not used)? For example, hard drive life decrease, system internals (Processors, RAM etc.) aging faster than usual, etc?

The Answer

SuperUser contributor David Zaslavsky responds:

From a software perspective, an operating system and the programs you run on it tend to accumulate all sorts of cruft over extended periods of use – temporary files, disk caches, page files, open file descriptors, pipes, sockets, zombie processes, memory leaks, etc. etc. etc. All that stuff can slow down the computer, but it all goes away when you shut down or restart the system. So shutting down your computer every once in a while – and I do mean actually shutting down, not just hibernating or putting it to sleep – can give it a “fresh start” of sorts and make it seem nice and zippy again.

Notwithstanding, distinctive PCs and OS's are not all similarly influenced by this sensation. By and large, a PC with a great deal of RAM can try for any longer than a PC with just a little Slam. A server, on which you simply start up a couple of projects and after that let them work, will be fine for any longer than a desktop PC, where you're continually opening and shutting distinctive projects and doing diverse things with them. In addition, server working frameworks are upgraded for long haul utilization. It's likewise been said that Linux and Macintosh OS have a tendency to run for more than Windows frameworks, albeit as far as I can tell that for the most part relies on upon what programs you use on them, and less on any contrasts between the pieces of the working frameworks themselves.

On the off chance that you'd like to do further perusing more centered around your particular setup, make a point to look at extra How-To Nerd articles on the subject like: