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From: weisen@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Neil Weisenfeld)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Computer on 24hrs.day? (yes or no)
Message-ID: <23080@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 90 15:43:14 GMT
References: <28294@ubvax.UB.Com> <MORGAN.90Mar28233102@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> <28311@ubvax.UB.Com> <18908.26174f84@merrimack.edu> <1990Apr5.191427.28003@tinton> <19461@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
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Reply-To: weisen@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Neil Weisenfeld)
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In article <1990Apr5.191427.28003@tinton> dan@tinton.UUCP (Daniel Masi <masid>) writes:
>In article <18908.26174f84@merrimack.edu> linderd@hubdub.UUCP writes:
>>In article <28311@ubvax.UB.Com>, gregk@ubvax.UB.Com (Greg Kendall) writes:
>>> In article <MORGAN.90Mar28233102@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> morgan@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Dylan Kaufman) writes:
>>> 
>>> ... stuff deleted ...
>>>>My undertanding is that it is indeed harder on the system to have the
>>>>shock of being turned on than to be left on, but that the difference
>>> 
>> This is exactly my point. A lot of people "understand" this point.
>>> I know of no evidence (such as MTBF numbers) on which to beleive it.
>>
>>  My big concern (and the reason I don't leave my PC on all the time) is the
>>*moving* parts, namely the power supply fan and the disk drive motor.  Also,

I run a lab at school with 30 AT&T 6312s.  Due to the stupidity of the
design of the video system, repeatedly turning on the machine kills the
monitor.  The monitors are powered through the video card (Yes, this is
true) and probably get hit with some pretty unclean power as the computer is
turned on.  In the past few months, I've left the PCs on continuously with
a screen saver installed.  We just blew our first hard disk yesterday.
(They're ST251 pieces o' junk).

We discussed this a few months ago and the consensus seemed to be that if
you are leaving your computer on for more than 13 or so hours a day, leave
it on.  Otherwise, turn it off at night.  For the lab which is open from
10am to 1am, I opted to leave them on.  We will see how many hard disk
casualties the next few months bring.

Neil

               _____          _____       ------------------------------------
 \            /     \        /    /      Neil Weisenfeld
  \          /       \      /    /      Computer Science and Engineering
   \        /    /\   \    /    /      Unviersity of Pennsylvania
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     \    /    /    \   \/    /      InterNet:  weisen@eniac.seas.upenn.edu
      \  /    /      \       /      USPS:  3700 Spruce St. Box 572
       \/____/        \_____/             Philadelphia, PA  19104
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