re monitors should they be kept on hours a day in article c uhhi hdg austin ibm com kelleyb austin ibm com kelley boylan wrote yes i know computers and harddisk drives should be always on but what about monitors they generate a lots of heat should i or shouldn t i keep them on hours a day any advice thanks take care paul there has been no empirical evidence to support the first statement true there is a power surge at startup that has the potential to do damage but the internal power supply is well protected i ve turned my mac on and off six or seven times a day for three years without problem the monitor is the same to leave it on is to waste a lot of electricity twice as much as a television possibly more turn it off when you re not using it it ll save you money and the world a few more resources the problem with turing your computer on and off constantly is not due to the power surge at start up it is due to thermal fatigue you turn on your computer it heats up and everything expands you turn it off it cools off and everything contracts there is a limited number of cycles of this that any component can take before it fails modern electronics are much more robust in this respect than their predeccesors in fact portable computers are designed with this in mind since the sleep function that extends battery life also greatly increaces the number of thermal cycles that occur as a rule of thumb if i am not going to use my computer and this includes the monitor in the next hours i turn it off i always dim the monitor when not in use to prolong the life of the phosphor i tend to think that with the pace of technical innovation in the computer industry you should be much less concerned with the fatigue life of your equipment and more concerned with how long your particular architecture will be supported by hardware and software vendors charles kuehmann northwestern university steel research group
