Term paper Research

Put simply. Pros for one are cons for the other.

For daily shut down.
1 reduce power used;

2 restricts ability of others to access via Internet or Lan;

3 lower risk of damage via power surge whilst absent;

4 less chance of data loss through power loss whilst absent.

For never shutting down.
1 Most damage to hard drives and motherboards is done when the system powers up from cold, the surge of power through the motherboard heats up the metal tracks and connectors, in most cases the tracks can only handle so many surges before the expansion and contraction causes a burn out.

2 The hard drives start with their full weight on the spindle and bearing and as they get up to speed the momentum etc actually takes most of the weight off the bearing, thus the more often it turns on and off the quicker it wears out. With most modern hard drives this is not as much of a problem as it used to be.

3 Reduced waiting time when wanting to use the PC, the load up time for most modern operating systems are fairly long now and leaving the system on a software locked reduces the access time.

4 Also many a virus and trojan requires a reboot to fully infect your PC, not restarting can make them easier to clean out.