Yes very true i never received a reply from ntl and i sent an email last november!

none of my machines are EVER shut down (apart from during hardware upgrades)

Never had a problem...

ÃƒÆ’Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â«ÃƒÆ ’‚« My Puter Stats ÃƒÆ’Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â»ÃƒÆ ’‚» OS-[Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 4 (5.0 - 2195)]- Up Time-[1wk 4days 9hrs 6mins 32secs]- CPU-[1-Intel Pentium III (Cu), 996MHz, 256KB (57% Load)]- Memory-[Usage: 326/511MB (63.80%)]- Video Card-[Intel 810 Accelerator & NVidia TNT2 32Mb]- Resolution-[1280 x 1024]- Total Space Free-[126.85Gb out of 358.06Gb]- «

Win2k is very stable, I have it at work and having suffered Win 98 for 2 years it's a dream ... I switch it on Monday morning and it stays on until Friday evening.

hmmm maybe i should get rid of 98 it has caused me a few problems lately!:mad:

/me can't resist ...

Junk your PC and get a Mac ... if you want a stable OS that's beautiful to play with, you can't beat Mac OS X 10.2...

/trying to be pragmatic

For sure, I had no end of trouble with Windows 98. It was a constant pain. It remains so for those poor saps here in the office who still have to use it. If you're sticking with Window$ then I can heartily recommend w2k, but perhaps you ought to look to M$'s more up to date stuff. I don't use XP apart from occasionally through Virtual PC on my Mac tho', so I'm not best placed to say how good it is.

i believe xp is fine and works much better than 98 - need a new pc really - i dontmind macs but i still play pc games!

It's worth a reboot from time to time. Some software (including Windows itself, occasionally), "leak" memory. This means they allocate a chunk of system RAM for a task and forget to release it.

This is much less of a problem than it used to be (and in the past a Windows machine most likely wouldn't stay up for 24 hours anyway), but the odd reboot is the most certain thing to give you a clean sheet as far as RAM is concerned.

The "powering up & down is bad for electronics" argument is true, but your PC contains mechanical devices too, such as fans in the case and PSU, and the hard disks, whose "mean time before failure" (MTBF) is dependent on running time. Also, modern processors run quite hot. So, if you're going to be away for a while, I reckon it's worth shutting down the PC.

I thought I had it clear in my mind that I was o.k. to leave my tower on. Now you have confused me, (which is not a difficult task) How long is a while in your estimation?

I reboot my machines once a week :)

...but as jemnery says about memory leaks, or unclaimed memory, if you are on NT/Win2k/2k3/XP then reboot weekly...if you're still on Win98/ME then reboot every couple of days.

I must stress this is based on experience/ personal preference/ habit and something to do while my tea is cooking :p

I turn my tower off every night because my PC is only on for a couple of hours a night. Am I damaging it by turning it on / off every day?

No.

Actually that is a matter of contention Russ...

The only thing about powering down a pc is the fans / hard drive motors...

The startup current drawn and torque involved in starting them turning is higher than leaving them running, therefore if a hard drive is going to fail then it does so as you turn it on, the same way that a light bulb blows as you turn it on normally as opposed to blowing while it is in use.

Well technically you are right, plus I believe there was a study in to Intel chips and how many times they can have power surging through them which showed there was a theoretical limit but in reality it was agreed the risk was low.

If I can find a link for the study I'll put it on here.

If you turned it off every time you went to make a coffee that would be different (but then again maybe not).

It would also be damn annoying.

Leccy, leccy, leccy, I am so leccy in love :)