Re: How much?

[Raymond <Reb.barnett@xxxxxxx>]

One of our clients had an old (12yrs old) Apricot server. The last time
the Apricot engineer came out to look at it he strongly advised never
turning the machine off because in his opinion, it was unlikely to power
on properly again, and if something did break, spare parts were no
longer available...

Surprisingly, they've since replaced the server - it's now sat in our
loft so maybe I'll try powering it up...

In my experience, PCs only seem to go wrong when powered up from cold,
which means that rebooting a 95 or NT machine occasionaly shouldn't be
too bad a thing, since you're not actually turning it off. We power down
our workstations every night (for insurance reasons) and too frequently
the don't boot up properly.

I seem to remember that one of the reasons notebook hard drives are more
expensive, is because they have to cope with being turned off and on
more frequently because of power management systems - I think the specs
for notebook and desktop hard drives reflect this difference with their
quoted lifetimes.

Ray Barnett.

> For computers, I would say it depends on the OS.  I view
> powering down a
> Windows box occasionally as a Good Thing, to make sure all
> the hardware
> gets reset, but that means once a week or whatever.  A well
> set up Linux
> machine (or even a fairly badly set up one) should give no
> reason to power
> it down, unless you are fitting or removing hardware.  In general, any
> electronic equipment will last longer if it is left running,
> unless it is
> something used rarely or designed for intermittent use (like washing
> machines, drills etc ;-) ).  That's probably part of why
> security systems
> seem to run and run and run...

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