Per Mayayana:
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...

I'm guessing that myth was perpetrated by lazy office
people who didn't want to wait for boot each morning
at work.

I suspect it came from experience with dumb terminals.
Back in the mainframe days.

Somebody in our shop got the bright idea of turning off all the dumb
terminals at COB every day to save electricity.

They got an award from the suggestion system for it because they were
able to quantify the project savings:
#OfTerminals*WattsPerTerminal*Hours).

But what we found was that service calls for the terminals
increased enough to more than outweigh the electric
savings. I guess it was the heating/cooling/cracking
thing, but I don't really know - but the service calls
*did* increase enough that and we went back to leaving them on 24-7.
--
Pete Cresswell