I personally find it hard to sleep at night whilst knowing that my home PC and / or laptop are running as, being electrical equipment, they represent an inherent fire risk and as such I power mine off at night, just as I do for most of the other unnecessary household electrical appliances
Nb. One thing we learn as pilots, and also as part of common sense, is ‘The Triangle or Fire’, i.e. to have a fire you need oxygen, plus a source of heat / ignition, and fuel - and electricity can certainly be a source of heat & ignition, e.g. did you know that you can start a substantial fire with just a 9V battery and some iron-wool ?
Take any one of the three away and you’ll prevent / stop a fire.
Also, computers are most definitely capable of catching fire – I’ve seen it !
So. I'd much rather take the hit on repair / recover of the home computers, than trying to replace the kids post inferno !
That said, I don't worry so much about the servers at work as they are just that - i.e. fitted dual everything, and so double the redundancy ( and before somebody points out the obvious, also double the stuff to go wrong too ) - and as such they're, somewhat necessarily, running 24/7.
Last edited by CrashDive; 1st Jun 2003 at 05:26.