GeoffF100 wrote:I expect that your electricity bill is more than mine. I only draw power when I am using one of my machines, not 24/7 for all of them.
Maybe, but perhaps not enough to worry about. My general use computer draws ~17 W at idle (the screens obviously power save) and less than that if asleep.
Let's assume electricity is 20p/kWh as a reasonable worst case. If I never sleep the machine (and in reality it sleeps or is off for say 12 hours a day) then it's 59 hours to use a kWh, or 20p.
8760 hours in the year, so that's (8760/59) kWh ->148Kwh, or about £30 if the machine were on full time. Given it's asleep about half the time, the total cost is going to be under £20, and obviously some of that electricity use would be unavoidable (i.e. it's when I'm using the machine), so I'd estimate the incremental cost of leaving it on is well under £10.
The machine has got 32 GB of RAM and a couple of 1TB SSDs, so it runs most of what I want as a VM, it's not a hardship to stick to the one machine, and I'm quite happy to accept spending an extra £10 or so a year to have the convenience of having everything available instantly with all the software etc as I left it.
One last thing to note - I hooked a watt meter up to the computer to check the power consumption, and it's quite noticeable that power draw just after boot is significantly higher - update clients running, processes starting etc - it peaked at around 60W. It looks as if it's not worth shutting a reasonably modern office spec PC down if you're going to use it again in the near future, purely on environmental grounds.
Obviously these numbers are different if you've got something with a huge high end GPU, or insist on turning SpeedStep and similar off.