On Sat, 2005-05-03 at 13:00 -0800, Michael wrote: > You really don't want to shutdown your computer that often anyway. > Startup and shutdown are stressful on your hardware. The more you do it > the higher your chance of something dying. As a colleague once said: "The only time my computer fails to turn on is after I've turned it off". :-) > An example being that most > computer's fans don't keep going after the computer is shutdown. During > the time from when you shutdown, until the computer has naturally > cooled, the insides of your computer are exposed to increased high > tempertures. Not really. As soon as the computer is turned off, the heat sources all disappear, so the temperature has nowhere to go but down. Sure, I suppose the air temperature in the case might go up a bit as the hot components cool down, but I don't think it would be significant. Not to mention that leaving it on causes everything to stay hot forever, which isn't good for the hardware either. I think you'll get more stress from power cycling because of voltage spikes, inrush current, etc. While powering cycling causes stress, so does leaving it on. I suppose you would need to figure out how long it's going to be off and decide which is the lesser of two evils. Leaving it powered up for short stretches would be preferable to frequent power cycling, but turning it off would probably be better than leaving it on but unused for long periods. With the reliability of modern hardware, I don't think either way poses a significant problem. I leave mine on for convenience.
