Leave it on or leave it off

[kap]

[quote MacMagus]Is power your main concern? What kind of PC?
Not so much about the power.
It's Windows XP SP2
Come to think of it, our Windows desktops are more likely to crash and burn from the virii, spyware and what have you than from being left on all the time.

[olnacl]

Our corporation pops up a message every 48 hours on our XP SP2 workstations reminding us to reboot - and we're talking way more than three hundred thousand machines overall. I'm more concerned with memory leaks, etc, leaving a PC on for days (although we often just dismiss the popup, I admit) I work on a couple hundred (non server) machines myself and while they are on 24 / 7, I reboot every chance I get. Servers get rebooted when they crash and that's about it.

[MacMagus]

> I do a full power down, and restart every 10-14 days. 2-3 times a month
> basically, and I run Onyx and Disk Utility then.

Do you have OCD? You know there are drugs to treat that now.

Restarting: Okay. Good sense to do it occasionally.

Shutting down first... unnecessary strain on the PSU and other components if you're just starting up again a few seconds later.

Onyx and the DU...? Twice each month? Ever heard the expression "overkill?"

[olnacl]

[quote MacMagus]Shutting down first... unnecessary strain on the PSU and other components if you're just starting up again a few seconds later. In our case, a cold boot is necessary as a reboot doesn't clear everything on Windows - We find performance results will vary when rebooting between tests while the results are consistant with a cold boot between. I can't speak for UNIX based machines. Of course, we may be going beyond the poster's original question...

[cbelt3]

Turn it off. Reduce your carbon footprint, shave the whales, and freeze the polar ice to protect those cute polar bear babies.

[blooz]

I don't have enough Barbasol to shave the whalwes.