Although it's faster and easier to simply send your PC to sleep, not turning it off can lead to infuriatingly slow performance and problems with your Wi-Fi.

This is because over time, your operating system, apps and programmes begin to accumulate some leftover digital mess.

These include temporary files, disk caches, page files, open file descriptors, zombie processes, and more.

And there's another common problem as applications you thought you'd quit weeks ago can end up hogging valuable space in your memory.

This can then cause rival apps to run significantly slower than usual.

If that wasn't reason enough to hit the off button there's also another issue.

If you have any driver crashes or software hiccups, you can experience problems with your Wi-Fi connectivity, too.

Putting your laptop or desktop machine to sleep or enabling hibernate mode will not solve the issue.

That's because sleep mode still sips enough power to keep the computer’s state in memory.

Other parts of the computer are shutdown to save battery, but the disk caches, zombie processes, memory leaks, and more, will remain intact.

Windows' hibernate mode is a similar affair.

This mode saves its current state to your hard drive – dumping the contents of its RAM into a file on its hard drive.

Your PC will use about the same amount of power as one that's shutdown, but the same troublesome processes are saved.

Fortunately, shutting down your computer every once in a while can give your machine a fresh start.

SuperUser technology blog contributor David Zaslavsky claims: "Different computers and OS’s are not all equally affected by this phenomenon.

"Generally, a computer with a lot of RAM can go for much longer than a computer with only a little RAM. A server, on which you just start up a few programs and then let them work, will be fine for much longer than a desktop computer, where you’re constantly opening and closing different programs and doing different things with them.

"Plus, server operating systems are optimised for long-term use.

"It’s also been said that Linux and Mac OS tend to run for longer than Windows systems, although in my experience that mostly depends on what programs you use on them, and not so much on any differences between the kernels of the operating systems themselves."

If you notice that your computer is slogging through some simple tasks – and you find yourself struggling to remember the last time you shutdown your PC – it might be time to reboot.

(dailystar.co.uk)