Leaving iMac on for extended time

[Peabody]

Basically 5 years running to date. No problems. Just restart when I have to...

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

Is it actually bad to turn it off and on when your not using it? You guys sound like you leave it on for ever and I was getting worried about leaving it on for 2 hours while I was having tea or doing something else. Wow so is it actually better to leave it on all the time?

NO it is not better. Do you leave the lighting on in your home all the time? Do you leave your car running all the time? I have seen more electronical equipment gets destroyed from sudden power-spikes than on-off wear. So, do yourself a favour and turn it off if you don't need it. And by this I mean - disconnect it from mains.

It is just a silly excuse for being lazy and coming from a land of plenty where people don't care about everything but themselves. The best excuse I heard so far: I hate when it drops my internet connection. Are you running some some servers that must be reached from the net? If not, please put your computer at sleep if you are not currently using it - Macs wake up almost instantaneously and my DSL needs about 2 sec to fire up the connection.

If are not using it for the day - switch it off altogether. This has the additional favour that it runs Power-on-Selftest which otherwise will only be run when your are doing SW-updates and if your Mac fails you will not know if it was the patch or something else was broken.