Poll: Do you turn your PC off at night?

An electrician once told me that turning your computer off and then on again uses more electricity than just leaving it on for hours, an oversimplification if not an outright lie that I believed for years. While it is true that turning your PC off and on puts wear and tear on the components, so does leaving it on for hours and hours.

Now that turning a PC on takes an amount of time so miniscule you don’t even have a chance to get a drink before it’s ready to go, there’s no good excuse for adding to your power bill by leaving it on. Of course, we do things we have no good excuse for all the time, like starting another campaign as Karl Franz in Total War: Warhammer despite all the other campaigns we haven’t even tried yet.

Where do you stand on this, the most divisive issue in PC gaming this side of Dragon Age 2’s relative position in the series tier list? Our strategic director Evan Lahti is team turn if off, because any more hours his PC is on are hours dust is being sucked into the system. Meanwhile, our US news lead Andy Chalk got into the habit of leaving his on back when he ran a BBS and still does. Our former hardware editor Jarred Walton used to turn his desktop PC off because its RGB lights were too bright, but would leave his laptop on, necessitating the addition of a third option to my otherwise neat poll.