Unless there is a practice critical reason why you can't turn off your computer at the end of the day (and if there is why isn't the server handling it?) Shut it down when you finish for the day.

The hardware components in a computer are just not designed to be left on without having a rest, to keep costs down manufacturers use cheaper components in a desktop PC compared to a server. A genuine server from a recognised vendor such as HP or Dell is designed to be running continuously. A server is engineered to manage, store, send and process data, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 356 days a year. For these reasons, servers need to be far more reliable than desktop PC’s.

From a software perspective, an operating system and the programs you run on it tend to accumulate all sorts of stuff over extended periods of use – temporary files, disk caches, page files, open file descriptors, pipes, sockets, zombie processes, memory leaks, 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.

As we approach summer this is even more important as computers are more susceptible to overheating when left on, shutting them down also saves power and allows important security and software updates to happen efficiently. As part of our managed service offering in most cases we can automatically shut your computers down and wake them up again in the mornings to save users from scrabbling round by a compressor trying to find the power button...

Just think about next time you are about to walk away from your computer.