What Apps and Maintenance Tools Do You Run While You're Sleeping? [Ask The Readers]

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It's generally a good practice to power down your computer every night to save on electricity, but you can easily schedule shutdowns at specific times. So how do you take advantage of those extra cycles at night while you're sleeping?
Photo by Ingorrr.
Last week reader Brady C Knight asked what great apps people run while they're sleeping, and it got us wondering, too. So before we throw it out to you, here's a few suggestions from our end:

• Automate Your Self-Repairing Hard Drive
• Run CCleaner on a Schedule to Keep Your PC Crap-Free
• Back up your hard drive. For online backups, try one of these five best online backup tools (I particularly like Mozy); for local backups, see our previous guide to automatically backing up your hard drive.

You've also got your other common overnight stand-bys, like downloading large files over BitTorrent. Remember, as I said above, just because you're running a few maintenance tasks or downloads overnight doesn't mean you can't also save some energy when your computer isn't working; just check out a few of our favorite methods for automatically shutting down your computer at a certain time for help in that arena.
Now let's hear your thoughts: Share the apps and maintenance tools your computer's running while you sleep in the comments.

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