Rebooting your computer is the best thing you can do for a computer.
I agree.. however there are also people out there that suggest that power & thermal hot/cold cycling is worse than leaving live.
Personally if there is no need for the system to be on it should be off, as for why waste electric, have it accumulate borked bits until a crash or leak type situation, as well as the mechanical wear on fans and hard drives, and shortening of electrolytic caps through thermal drying of electrolyte.
I kind of have always treated my computers like cars with mileage sort of.... I will have a new computer and an old computer and if I dont want to put the mileage on my new computer and the old computer has no problem with the posted speed for the software, I will run that high mileage computer instead of the new one. However if you have a work load that requires more processing power ( sort of like more horse power for cars ), then use the newer system instead. By putting more mileage on the beaters, the better computers lasted longer before failure by limiting use to them to only when that much processing power is needed.
However operating this way.... you also have to look at, at what point does it make sense to call it quits with an electron guzzling beater. Such as a Pentium 4 2.0Ghz made in 2002, its still going, but its actually not power efficient. So for example the Pentium 4 will run on say 120 watts, and a modern low cost low processing power build such as with AMD Kabini Sempron 3850 AM1 APU 1.3Ghz quadcore with a 25 watt TDP CPU, is more powerful and runs around 35 to 40 watts. So at some point the beater needs to get replaced with a more efficient beater system. My beater system is this low power Kabini Sempron Quadcore
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113366So I mostly run between this Kabini 1.3Ghz Quadcore, Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz Quadcore ( with cool n quiet for 780Mhz idle ), and AMD FX-8350 x8 4.0Ghz 8-Core ( with coon n quiet for 1400Mhz idle ). And run them matched to the software or games I will be running to save electricity and balance out the mileage on them. * The middle system the Athlon II x4 620 gets the majority of the workload though because it fits more use scenarios such as I can be crunching game play video data with virtual dub to size down a recorded game event from 25GB to 800MB and playing a game at same time with minimal impact, yet the Kabini would choke on this multitask with the same game at the same time(yet the system can run the game flawless if the game is without background crunching ), and the 8core would run mostly idle with only 25% cpu usage etc because its overkill.
For mobile computing I have a Toshiba Netbook with Atom 1.66Ghz and a ASUS Laptop with 1000M Celeron 1.8Ghz.
Most of my gaming is on desktops. Although the Celeron 1000M with Intel HD GPU is not that bad for games I play on it.
