How long can you leave the iMac on for?

I hear some people have problems with the way the iMac vents, and it gets too hot. Is this just leaving it on and using it, or leaving it on but having it sleep ?

How long can you leave it on with the monitor off ? Can you turn the monitor off like with a non intergrated monitor, or is this what sleep is for ?

With my PC I like to keep it on forever unless it crashes or I need to install something and reboot, and just turn the monitor off until I neede to use it again. Can I do this with the iMac ?

I'm keeping my iMac on constantly (usually two to three days without sleep) - I don't remember the last time I turned it off, no over-heating issues and this is the rev A iMac (17") G5 I'm talking about - when it comes to heat problems probably the worst one.

As for your question - no, there is no way to turn off the monitor manually (I may be wrong). You can have it set so that it turns it off after particular time. You could also put it to sleep - it wakes up instantaneously.

Since I purchased my iMac I have not turned it off... so I would say it's good to go

Eh...mine sleeps every night and I shut it off for around 16 hours at least once every 2 weeks. All is well here too, but I'm sure I could go without turning if off.

Thanks guys!
This puts me at ease .

Actually, letting it sleep at night is bad, because it needs to run daily, weekly, and monthly scripts to keep it running well. I just let my display sleep at night on my iBook, and only restart when an app install or update makes me (which is unfortunately quite often, every three days or so it seems).

meh, I just let all my apple stuff sleep. I don't see any problems arising out of it.

I turn it off whenever there's a lightning storm, cause where I live, there
are lot's of them.

i've never turned mine off and i've had it since august. zero problems, and i keep a temp probe program running just to be safe.

I only restart my Mac if it's required, otherwise I keep it running and turn the brightness on the display all the way down.

never really shut the computer down; i just let it 'sleep' at night. although i may start just dimming the monitor at night to let it run it's scripts and whatnot.

now this is only going off of other information i've heard, is it correct that the computer runs it's scripts like around 2-3am? and what exactly is it doing at this time? i use the term scripts to assume that it's verifying permissions and running some sort of disk utility?

enlighten me please

I was messing around with something the other day,
and I think it gave a report of a script. It said the iMac did something at five am the other night, when I was sleeping. So...

All my machines stay on all the time except my iBook, I've never had any problems (except deafness from fan noise, **** my AMD 64 system is LOUD) by doing this.

Amen-Moses

I never turn mine off

should be able to stay on as long as you want.
But one thing i have noticed about Imacs if you put your had close to the screen, they are very hot, guess it will save a bit on the heating bill

macanal said:

should be able to stay on as long as you want.
But one thing i have noticed about Imacs if you put your had close to the screen, they are very hot, guess it will save a bit on the heating bill

Click to expand...

They're the warmest on the mid-top left...

So far I've had mine on for about five days straight, with update reboots in between.
I just do like others suggested above and turn the brightness all the way down...