From: John Beckett 

"Geo"  wrote in message news::
> It's scary rebooting web servers that almost never get rebooted. Because if
> anything is going to go wrong, that's usually when it rears it's ugly head.
>
> Think about it, when your computers have broken, was it that they wouldn't
> boot up or did they suddenly die while you were using them?

Absolutely. Hence Microsoft's advice to reboot BEFORE installing an update
(to find out if your system will survive a reboot so you don't blame the
update for a problem you had anyway).

However, I think the reboot is just enough stress to cause a flakey system
to actually die - the fault was there and was going to get you anyway.

Going back 20 years, turning on a disk drive could dim the room lights
(slight exaggeration)  Now that was stress. Modern systems don't do that.

However, you're perfectly correct that it's the temperature changes that
can kill components - bad solder connections and other circuit board flaws
will show up when temperature cycles occur.

Servers are run continuously for a number of reasons, so I'm really only
talking about people's desktops. My hunch is that a cheap disk drive (the
only kind that you can buy) will rotate a certain number of times, and then
it will stop. Same for a fan.

John

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5