Power issues aside, I don't want to sleep with the noise.

i leave both of mine running. one is my server, hosting my sites and my church's site. my pc, i just dont feel like waiting for it to boot up when i want to use it.

/me is lazy.

later

Cool ...thanks...though I am always late to upgrade my system...still probably a few years is reasonable,,,

Hard drive start/stop cycles are pretty stressful too, and hard drives are fairly prone to failure (comparatively) (not to mention so painful to lose all your data). Fans are also prone to not spin up after having been spinning constantly for years. I've heard stories of servers running for several years straight, and then being shut down finally for some reason or another, and the hard drives just won't spin up again. I've seen a computer that was running for about a year straight get shut down, and the CPU fan wouldn't spin up any more.

I personally leave four computers running 24/7. The only time they're actually OFF is if I have to move (I've been moving about one to two times per year, for the past few years), and I only reboot them maybe once every three months. I disable hard drives from spinning down, because of the spin up/down stress mentioned above.

I've also heard mention that if you have crappy power coming to your home/building, you might still be better off turning the computer off when not in use, as the dirty power can do more harm that the power cycles. That said, this could presumably be solved by a nice UPS with automatic voltage regulation/pure sine-wave output guaranteed.

Let's see... i'm raid 0, turn comp off every night..

It's lose data time! :P

I always leave my PC on and have for a very long time. For one thermal stress can be an issue over the longer term and I tend to keep components for a long time in one capacity or another.

I think back to one time when I had a pc that was always on a UPS. It ran for years and years. One day it was moved and it was powered down for the first time in like 4 years. The hard drive would not spin back up. It was quite amusing. As long as it kept running it was fine, but once it cooled down it was done. We did manage to get most of the data off though.

Another factor for me is convience. It takes way too long for my PC to bootup. I reboot it every few weeks, because I hate waiting for it to boot up. I use my computer all the time, and when I want to do something I want to get right to it, not wait 5 minutes for the computer to show up.

laziness is going to be the death of this planet...

In the past, leaving a computer ON all the time was never a good idea, but now with the way everything is built, it's quite common and sometimes benefical for a computer to always be ON. Another thing worth mentionning is that, the other extreme, turning your computer ON for brief minutes and turning it back OFF is not that good of an idea either.

it's the same principle as operating a vehicle to me... Have it on when you need it on, then turn it off.
Sure, it's hard to turn it on, but leaving it on is a waste of resources.

That is so true.