Yeah, way off topic, but I'll chime in. All this booting stuff is no longer relevant. It's the equivalent of an 'old wives tale'.
In the past there were major reasons for turning them off: 1) Monitors didn't turn off/darken/sleep, and when left on, literally burned out. Same for hard drives, which originally ran so hot as to carry those stickers with the "hand on fire" icon. Some people said that other components and the power supplies also slowly baked and had a limited lifetime. This might also be true for fans as well, since rotational devices wear their bearings. 2) Memory managers and applications leaked, the OSes of old were just terrible at running for more than a few days, and IT guys learned that a good restart helped. Make this a daily routine and you solve a lot of headaches upfront. (think 3.1/95) 3) Power outages/brownouts/problems did bad things, and while a computer was sitting idle at 3am, it was susceptible. Today, few of these things are concerns. Monitors and software behave much better. Cooling is no longer an issue, and the MTBF for most components is measured in centuries. I typically run a few months between restarts on all my machines, and never leave them off, ever. Your concept of late-night maintenance is also very valid. The #1 argument of old for leaving them on was the electrical shock that components received when turning them on. This again, is no longer an issue since voltages are way down and power supplies are much smoother. To be honest, there are no longer arguments in either direction, with the exception of maintenance. When I ran a Mac based design shop, I let everyone turn off their machines, but I auto-booted them at 8am, ran my back ups and maintenance at 8:30 and everything was ready when people came in at 9. It really is a personal preference type thing. I suppose your IT guy can make policy in either direction and be right. Robert -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 7:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Witango-Talk: Way Off Topic - Daily Boot I am in a heated debate with a new fellow worker and I need some ammo on this one. Sorry for the off-topic post... I have always been under the assumption that it was harder on a computer to reboot it every day then to leave it running and maybe boot it weekly or monthly. Our company recently merged and everyone from the foreign company reboots daily while my people reboot only when necessary. One of the reasons for this is that I run anti-virus and other things at night while the computers are not being used. All the other employees have been told to shut down their desktops every night. They were told to do this by a previous IT guy. I tend to disagree with this. What do you think? Reboot Daily? or Only When Needed? THANKS! ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf
