If you're interested in taking the rsync route, check out our guide on how to mirror files across systems with rsync. Make your hard drive repair itself: You can't do much to save a hard drive from dying if it's fated in the stars, but you can do your part to keep your disks healthy—specifically by regularly defragmenting and checking for and repairing any disk errors. Our oldie-but-goodie guide to the self-repairing hard drive will allow you to schedule this maintenance once or twice per week, while you're sleeping, so you can rest easy that you've done all you can to keep your disks running in tip-top shape.
Keep your computer up to date: This one's kind of a no brainer, but still very worth the reminder. Granted, some power users would prefer vetting each and every Windows update before it's applied, but for most folks, there's not much of a reason not to automate this process while they're out. To schedule updates via Windows Update, just launch the Update tool from the Control Panel, click the Let me choose my settings link, and choose your preferred automated update settings.
OS X users, your Software Update tool isn't quite as friendly about setting specific times for checking for and downloading updates, but Macworld's Christopher Breen has some clever tips for scheduling Software Update that'll do the trick. Clean house: Whether you're talking antivirus, crap cleaning, or other general PC cleanup, there's no better time to run those scans and maintenance tools than while you're catching some Z's.
It may depend on your antivirus application of choice, but you should have some sort of built-in scheduling option for running antivirus and spyware scans.
Now that you've got your PC taking care of its most important maintenance tasks overnight, let's look at a few other common overnight uses. Downloads: When we asked about overnight PC use, downloading using tools like BitTorrent ranked very high among those who responded, and for obvious reasons: Downloads can take a long time, and those hours you're sleeping are hours that big downloads can be completing.
But rather than keep your PC on all night long—even after it completes your download—most popular file downloaders have built-in options for shutting down, hibernating, or otherwise powering off your computer when the download in question completes. Everything from the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent whose options are pictured above to download managers like DownThemAll have these options built in.
Video encoding: Many of us will never know the time it takes to do some seriously heavy video encoding we're none of us Pixar , but if you've ever tried ripping a DVD here are five of the best ripping tools out there , you know how much time and CPU cycles video encoding can take. Outsource your ripping and other encoding jobs to the night so you can actually use your computer the next day. Share your computing power with researchers: Distributed computing tools allow researchers across the globe to use your extra CPU cycles to run a few algorithms of their own in the background using your computer.
That might not seem like much, but with enough computers, researchers can do some serious work with distributed computing. Wikipedia notes that Folding home, the most popular distributed computing network, has up to , active machines running at a time and has reached computing speeds of over 5. Although modern monitors are very efficient, having something producing a wall of light constantly can use a fair amount of energy over time, this is multiplied if you use multiple monitors or have your computer connected to a TV.
Alternatively, you can turn down the brightness to reduce power cost, but if you are not using your computer overnight you might as well turn them off. Another easy thing to do is to change the power mode on your computer. Most computers and especially laptops will have a power setting mode, that allows them to run while using less energy.
Incidentally, if you are using a laptop, leaving this unplugged wastes less energy, but if you do this, make sure you have enough charge to last the night. Ensure that all unnecessary programs and all external devices such as USB devices should be closed down and removed. Always check there are no programs running in the background as well, using the system tray or the task manager. You can set your computer to shut down at a certain time automatically, so if you know the game will download by 3am, you can shut it down then to save power for the rest of the night.
Those of us rocking the 56K dial up modem know the troubles of attempting to download the latest movies over our connection. Movies, games, torrents, and other files are large and can take some time to download. Depending on your Internet connection speed, the amount of other users connected to that provider, and quality of download site, you could be looking at a download that teeters into hours.
In order to download files overnight, you have to make some alterations to the power settings.
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