Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 17:32:40 03/28/02
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Some things come to mind, thinking a little more about this. First is electromigration. When current goes through circuits, the paths are eroded by miniscule amounts. This basically only matters within dense chips like microprocessors, where the connections are only a few hundred molecules wide. The point is that these chips wear out when you use them, but they're still designed/manufactured for 10+ years of continuous use, so it doesn't really matter. The problem is when you start overclocking and upping the current through the chips--some people claim that with high current, CPUs can be destroyed because of electromigration within 2 years. Again, not a problem if you don't overclock. The only other parts of a computer that wear out are the capacitors and the moving parts, i.e., the fans and hard drive. Old capacitors leak, but I don't know how usage patterns affect this leakage. I also don't know if fans wear out faster if they're left on or if they're cycled on and off. I know that hard drives used to wear when they were turned on and off, but now that we have autoparking heads and so forth, I don't think that's an issue. Laptop power-saving software is constantly turning hard drives on and off, and I haven't heard complains frop laptop users about hard drive lifespans. Really, I don't think it matters. I know people who leave their computers on all day and I know other people who turn theirs on and off many times per day, and the compuers all last a darn long time. -Tom
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