Originally Posted By: youdontwannaknow
About electricity - I measured the power consumed by my desktop pc using a power meter and it was at 85W running cpu intensive programs, 75W at idle, 55W in standby. So for the purpose of saving power and cost you are better off shutting it down. You arnt really saving anything in standby or sleep.
I don't know how old your PC is or how the sleep mode is configured, but most new PCs use next to nothing when in sleep. On mine all drives and fans spin down and it looks to be off. The only power used is for keeping the RAM contents. I don't have a power meter, but I would guess that there is a negligible difference between shutdown and sleep on my PC. The nice thing is that waking it up takes about 2-3 seconds and bootup takes 30secs to 1 minute.
