[LINK] Leave on, or turn off?

[Stewart Fist]

Ivan wrote:
-- 
Stewart Fist, writer, journalist, film-maker
70 Middle Harbour Road, LINDFIELD, 2070, NSW, Australia
Ph +61 (2) 9416 7458
> I suspect that Stewart is alluding to the overall cost in having a
> machine either on or off at times, but factors such as power spikes
> and other malevolent events depend on how well the box is constructed.

Actually my question started out with an argument between my professional
programmer son, and his miserly, penny-pinching, journo father.  He is a
24/7 man, while I've always switched my machines off (after losing a couple
to lightning strikes and overheating/power problems).

I haven't thought about this much over the last decade, but I now assume
from some of the postings that most servers these days use specially-built
high quality components.

I had assumed that virtually everything made for modern home and business
PCs, laptops and servers probably comes off the same mass-production
production-line -- so the basic disks, cpus, memory chips, etc would be
pretty much the same -- and hence any difference in survivability would be
due to added fans, power-surge protection, and the like.

Not so ???

---------
Incidentally, I once had breakfast with Bill Gates and we argued about the
relative merits of HDD and wafer-sized non-volatile RAM (which was a popular
idea at the time).  I was certain that battery-backed wafer-memory
technology was a real winner, while a rotating magnetic disk could never
hold more than a gigabyte.  They hadn't even invented Flash in those days.