Very common for a fun race . Your best bet is to start near the race with people who run at your speed . If you get trapped in the back your never getting away from the people . <| sep |> If it ' s properly configured , the computer will go into sleep mode and use a very minimal amount of power . Some companies want computers left on overnight for scheduled virus scans and software updates to be rolled out . Some people myself included don ' t enjoy restarting all their apps and reopening everything they had in progress every day . I avoid reboots like the plague and only do it when it ' s absolutely necessary . BTW , most hardware failures occur or are discovered at poweron . TLDR Unless you ' re told to leave the computer powered up , it doesn ' t matter and you ' re wasting too much mental energy thinking about whether it ' s a good habit to maintain .