In general, users should leave their computers turned on over night. There may be special circumstances (such as network or building maintenance) where you will be advised to power-down your system before leaving the office. There are several benefits to keeping the system powered on "after hours":

• Ability to use remotely access the system from your home or mobile environment via Remote Desktop

• Large jobs (such as printing or data crunching) can be run easily during this time

• Automatic virus updates and scanning can occur off hours

• Disk defragmentation and other scheduled maintenance can be done

For obvious security reasons, you should log out of your Windows environment before leaving for the day. It is a good practice to the Power Management (via Control Panel) to put the system monitor and hard disks in sleep mode off after 30 minutes of inactivity. However, these settings may be adjusted by individuals based on their preferences.