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Should Your Computer Stay On,Protect Your Privacy
PCs are like jetliners--they almost never crap out when cruising, but you have to watch those takeoffs and landings. Whether you should turn your PC off at night is up to you. Protect your privacy
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Should Your Computer Stay On:
My position in the debate: I say, forget the thing even has a power switch. Leave it on. That way your machine is instantly available, just like every other tech product you own. It also lets backup programs, antivirus apps, and spyware cleaners do their thing thoroughly every night without slowing you down--or vice versa. That's how the pros run machines after all.
The cost? The average PC draws something like 60 watts in normal operation. At the average national rate of 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, that's $6 a month running all the time. Add in a monitor, and you might round up to $10, much less for an LCD. So we're talking maybe $120 per year.
What about wear and tear? The only part of a PC you really worry about breaking is the hard drive. My Seagate Barracuda is a 600,000-hour part (as measured by its mean-time-between-failures rating). That's about 69 years, always on. I've also noticed that PCs are like jetliners--they almost never crap out when cruising, but you have to watch those takeoffs and landings. Cycling the power on a PC is when you should tighten your seat belt.
But if the benefits of instant-on and background housekeeping don't turn you on, here's a more human-based reason to never shut down your machine: It takes my computer 48 seconds to boot. During that time, if you're like me, you sit there, pretty much staring at the BIOS and Windows screens. Maybe you're even mouth-breathing. Done just once a day, that's 4.9 hours of looking stupid, every year. I'll gladly play $120 to take that off my resume.
Cookie Basics:
Cookies are very small text files (usually around 50 to 150 bytes and always less than 4kb) downloaded from a Web site by your browser. Some stay in your Random Access Memory and are deleted when you close your browser. Others are saved to your hard drive when you close your browser. They are used by Web site owners to remember your preferences and by advertisers to track your online habits, and target ads according to your interests. The use of the term "your" is a little misleading. It's not really "your" visits that are recorded, but "someone's." Cookies do not identify you, but they can keep track of your movements from page to page on a site. A cookie was first used to store information relating to a user ID and password for a web site so that we wouldn't have to enter information every time we logged onto that particular site. This is still the most common use of cookies today. For example, if you have a personalized start page, or a personalized news page, the only way your personalized page will appear rather than the standard page is by a cookie on your hard drive.
When you go to a personalized site, your browser looks for a cookie on your hard drive identifying you as a certain user and it sends that information to the server storing the page you are requesting, and the server knows to return your personalized page. If your browser doesn't find a cookie to send along, a regular page is returned from the server, and all of your hard work personalizing your page is gone!
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