I just had a discussion with my wife. I like to leave the computer on so my SETI program can continue to work but she likes to turn it off believing it's easier on the parts to rest them. So what do you do?

Due to the dial-up thing I just turn it off. If not for that I would not turn it off.

I try to leave mine on for SETI most of the time.

I leave mine on all week and then turn it off Sunday nite.

My Dad turns his off every nite.

It is hard for some of us dads to go to bed with anything on.

I've read studies that go both ways on this issue. If you are running Windows 9x or ME I would suggest that you either shut it down or restart it every day. If you are running 2k or XP don't worry about it as much. I know that one of the advantages of XP is that it was made to stay on without a restart for a couple of days.

It mainly depends on the weather whether I leave it on for a week at a time or not. When I was upstairs, I would turn it off during the summer months and when it got to hot in my little room.

Now that I am down in the basement with a much bigger room and it being winter , I leave it on alot as it is the only thing keeping me warm at night

Running SETI all the time.

I turn mine off because it is good for the computer to do so. Even if you have XP it is still good to turn it off, yes you can leave it on longer with XP but it is still a good idea to turn it off. The entire time you have your computer on your temp folder is building files and placing them there. When you turn off your computer most of the files are deleted unless they are internet cookies but most of them are deleted as well just not all. This goes with the temporary internet files folder as well. So if you leave it on you are wasting space in your harddrive and in time it can hurt your computer's parts because they are constantly working trying to keep the computer running without overloading it with heat and pointless crap. So unless you have the money to buy another computer in a year or two I suggest you turn it off at least every other day.