Will frequent rebooting hurt my pc?

[sara_dippity]

Yeah. Stupid question #5008.
I was just thinking, I started never turning my computer off (used to only at night). And I know that some people say reboot after you play a game, every time. Some people say they only reboot if they get a problem. Some say they only reboot once a week.
Is there a best way? Is there a way that can cause damage?

 

[lurkswithin]

the only thing I know that will hurt anything is the act of rebooting continueously right after another as this sometimes doesn't allow windows to properly open or shutdown properly and also cause a high degree of wear and tear on your other components also. All the rest is kind of like "old wives tales".
You can reboot after a gaming session so as to release stored memory as sometimes after long playing memory gets locked up in page files and "user profile hive files" failed to release and the such as thatand sometimes causes a high build up of temp files and prefetch files that may tend to lag your system down a little but even then it is not truely neccessary.
You should turn it off just to let it cool down and as some routine services are ran during shut down to do their job.
I use mine about 18 hours a day and shut it off evey day except when it is set to perform maintenance programs.
If that is any help.

 

[Kage]

Yeah, the only wear and tear that would happen is if you pressed the quick restart button on the case, completly resetting the PC straight away since Windows woudn't get a chance to save settings.

Going to Start, Shutdown, and then to Restart Shouldn't bother it, unless something is actually wrong with the hard drive before hand, which shouldn't be a problem.

If you are that bothered though, go to Start, Run, and type:

chkdsk.exe

This will scan for any possible errors on the machine that might have built up

EDIT: I forgot to mention the final step. I dont think it'll fix errors unless you tell it to. This can be done by typing this in run as an extra

chkdsk.exe /f

this will set Windows to fix what it finds. Also if the computer is running tasks it needs, it'll ask if you want to run it after a restart since no processes will be running then.

 

[sara_dippity]

M'k, thanks .

 

[Kage]

No probs Check the edited post, just a little extra you might need