Cindy Hamilton wrote:
>
> I shut down my home PC every night. It doesn't need to be talking
> to the Internet without me.

I shut down mine too most nights and always before I leave for work
for the day. If you're not going to use the machine for several hours,
best to turn it off. Doing that can reset things but more importantly,
it turns off your hard drive. Hard drive is the only physical thing
constantly moving in a computer. All that spinning is what wears them
out eventually and you get a crash. I've never had a hard drive go
bad.

When sf's hard drives slow down, she replaces them. When mine slow
down, I run defrag and fix them.