I used to belong to the 'leave your PC switched on' group of folk who believe that leaving a PC switched on saves your hard drives from an early grave. The reasoning being that the initial start-up of a HDD (and any other sensitive electrical equipment) is it's most stressful. In the 10 years of building and using PC's I never suffered any component failure but the cost in the electric bills would have been frightening.http://www.localcooling.com/facts/"A good spec PC can use up to 200 watts per hour and if you use a CRT Monitor... as much as 280 watts"I changed to TFT Monitors some months ago and after reading the statement in the link above I now switch my PC's off at the end of the day. I recently built a high end SLI PC (operating one 7900 GPU) and the more powerful GPU's must use lashings of power so I like to think I'm doing my bit towards Global Warming and saving on the electric bill at the same time. Ray

Er, a computer only uses that power when running fully-on. Of course there are a variety of power saving modes on modern computers that can provide any required level of power save from a simple screensaver or monitor suspension to a full system hibernation. In those modes a computer draws little more power than a light bulb so if you want to compensate, just take the light out of the fridge.The one thing that nobody ever considers are all these distributed programs like SETI that continue to suck the amps even when your computer is doing nothing productive for you, the computers owner. ####, I like charity as much as the next man and would like to see a cure for cancer or aliens proved to exist, but not if I have to pay for the privilege as well as donate my CPU time. If it were possible to claim back the current drawn for such activities against tax, then I might consider being an active participant. I leave the computer on if it suits me, I turn it off if it doesn't - I stacked the downloads of the European Texture replacements from the Avsim library and d/l'd them while I was asleep. I do that with most large downloads. The only thing I actually do as a habit is turn the monitor OFF, rather than leave it in standby mode. LCD screens wear out the backlight before they wear out the electronics through repeated hot/cold cycles.Allcott

Seems more like a hanger chat topic to me. I guess if I live near BG&E Calvert Cliffs nuke power plant I'm good to go.scott s..