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!
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