The strange problems of the always-on crowd
The last point I'll make is just one of personal experience. My current ocupation puts me in a position of being responsible for approxamately 500 users. One of the things I have personally noticed is that the people that seem to have the majority of strange problems are the people that never turn their computer off.

They show up at our door with their laptop telling us it won't do something it did just fine the day before. The majority of the time I find that a simple restart fixes the problem.

Dave's alternative approach
While I turn my computers off at night, my buddy Dave (Computing Unplugged's Editor-in-Chief) doesn't. Of course, he's a little weird, so I wouldn't recommend you do what Dave does in every circumstance.

Anyway, he works strange hours and sometimes through the night, and he likes his computers to be available whenever he wants them to be. So he keeps his machines on all the time. For some of those machines it makes sense. He has two machines dedicated to monitoring the health of the ZATZ servers, and he needs those machines on at all times just to see what's happening at his hosting provider.

The other 12 computers are a separate story. Some of the laptops he keeps off unless he's using them for something specific. But his desktop machine, development machine, test machines, and other media machines are on all the time.

There's a downside, though: something's always failing. About once a month, he's got a fan failure, a power supply failure, a drive failure or something else. It's not really that his stuff fails more often, but when you've got 12 or more computers, you're going to experience in a month what most people will experience in a year. Even so, his stuff does break more than I'd want.

Timothy S. Hillebrand, Ph.D., a retired archaeologist, runs a data processing business from his home office, and enjoys writing, his Japanese garden, and his recumbent bike. A longtime PDA enthusiast, he takes great pleasure in lecturing on eBooks and electronic publishing, and telling librarians that eBooks rule and treebooks drool.