Chris G cl@isbd.net
There is then of course the question of whether turning the machine on and off two or three times a day will wear it out more quickly than leaving it permanently running.
You may find help with suspend in the Linux Ecology HOWTO [ox.ac.uk LDP mirror] along with many other tips on how to reduce environmental damage from your computer. http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Ecology-HOWTO/index.html
Simon Richter emailed me notes about the different types of disk - which I don't really understand so I've asked him to publish them himself at http://www.hogyros.de/?q=blog/1 - the gist seemed to be server disks don't like being power cycled repeatedly and yanking the power is very harmful to desktop disks.
I've read articles that warn against powering down and up too often. They say that more frequent heating/cooling causing parts to fail, but I find the fans fail most often - which brings a different heating failure problem! I prefer to save some fan spin instead.
(Edited repeat of http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/lynn#howtonotmelt )
Hope that helps,