It's easyer for the hardware to remain running. Cold boots are the most stressing. If you had a machine running 24/7 for years, did you do it on windows?
Yes, but I wasn't meaning to say that they ran for 7 years without any down time at all. They shut down from time to time for moving the machines, lengthy power outages, fixing software problems, installing cards, were rebooted from time to time, etc. But we didn't turn them off at night and boot them up every morning in the company. Also, out of those hundreds of machines, some did fail, but not many. There were a few hard-disk failures, maybe some memory or motherboard failures, but not many, and usually on old machines.
At home, I've had a series of Dells starting from the PC's Limited Turbo PC in 1985 and continuing to today. Those were (until more recent times) turned off every night, turned on to use them, then shut off again if I was going not to be using it for hours, turned on again for use, etc. I don't have 500 examples of those, but probably a dozen. Those worked well also. I had one PSU fail on one of my Dimensions after it was a couple of years old. I bought a standard PSU from Fry's and plugged it in as a replacement. That's the only failure of my home machines that I remember, but it's possible that something failed over those 30 years that I don't remember.
