| It seems after a couple weeks of nonstop uptime (no hibernation and
| sleeps too; highest was 22 days!), my very old updated 32-bit Windows XP
| Pro SP3 will start misbehaving. I would need to start exiting stuff
| because softwares were not responding (Explorer, SeaMonkey, Trillian,
| cmd.exe, etc.) correctly. Eventually, this won't work anymore, and I am
| forced to reboot.
|
| What about the rest of you guys? Thank you in advance.

The longest for me is several hours. If I'm going to
be away for a break I "sleep" it. If I'm going out I
usually shut it down. I always shut it down at night.

I don't understand why people waste electricity and
increase hardware wear by leaving it on for no reason.
Are you just too impatient to wait a few seconds for
the machine to boot? Do you also leave your car running
all the time so you won't have to wait an interminable
30 seconds to start driving? Is your oven permanently
pre-heated? Do you leave all your lights on so that you
won't have to deal with the tedium of lifting your arm
*yet again* to flip the switch? If you don't do those
things then why do you leave your computer running?

There used to be a myth that shutting down wears
out the hardware. I once read a repair book that siad
there's some truth to that. Micro cracks can develop
in solder with temperature changes. But the book said
it would take 10 years or more for such affects to
show up. Meanwhile there's electricity wasted and
wear on hard disks, maybe RAM, monitor, fans, etc.
I'm guessing that myth was perpetrated by lazy office
people who didn't want to wait for boot each morning
at work.