"Ed" <vegased@stripbigfoot.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9539BFA7E25B8vegasedvegasedvegase@63.223.5.254...

"Stratcat" <none@no.org> wrote in
news:BYBPc.2011$Z56.1807@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com:

Not sure what your implying here. Tempaerature cycling is exactly what
will SHORTEN an electronics device's life. It's better to run
electronics in a steady state environment, within thier specs.

Electro-mechanical devices may last longer due to thier mechanical
nature, but in general, a great deal of stress occurs during the
temperature cycling phases, and the in-rush of currents that occur
when a device powers up.

Yep. There is a fire house, maybe in NJ, that had a light bulb that
Edison built still burning into at least the 90's.  Don't know if it is
still working, but they never turned it off.

The trade off with PCs has always been power usage vs. the life of SOME
parts.  If you keep a disk drive running all of the time, it will
probably fail sooner then if you powered the machine off.  Bottom line is
that the failure issues for computers are not as simple as many people
think.

Man, I don't know what was goin' on w/me last night. First, I
misunderstood Matt's post concerning pwr cycling, and now I
completely typo'd, by missing a 'NOT'!

The above should've read:

[...] Electro-mechanical devices may *NOT*  last longer [...]

Yeeshhh.

Think I got brain-drain trying to put the cpu pwr equations into
a keyboard friendly form.

Yeah, the non-mechanical electronics, if correctly designed, and
run w/i spec, including temp specs & good clean pwr specs, should
last pretty much forever. Well, at least for a very long time.

It's the electro-mechanical stuff, like fans, switches, and drives, that
are prone to wear.

BTW - Here's a freebee HDD monitoring tool if you have S.M.A.R.T
monitoring on your HDD, and it's enabled:

http://www.panterasoft.com/

2nd proggy down called 'HDD Health'.

It monitors probably more stuff then anybody would probably care to know,
and over the year and a half I've run it, I can't verify its prediction
ability, since I haven't had any failures. But it's kinda' reassuring seeing
it state my nearest expected TBF is 10/03/2013, predicted accurate
w/i 97%! ;-)
-- 
Strat