UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong says, “Get a Mac!” Prof. DeLong, normally a smart and witty analyst, needs to go back to school on this one. His argument is based on a third-hand quotation from Robert Scoble (via Owen Thomas’s Ditherati, which in turn took the quote from the snarky and entertaining but not exactly reliable Register). Reportedly, Scoble said, “ “I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot. Why do I do that? Because I’ve been using computers for 20 years and have learned that’s the best way to work.” Prof. DeLong’s response sounds like something you’d hear from a freshman about to start a food fight:
Snort. Guffaw. Chortle.
The idea that one dare not try to save the state of one’s system overnight…
It is indeed the best way to work if you have an operating system with nine fives of reliability. For those of us whose operating systems have five nines of reliability, however…
bradford% uptime
22:13 up 14 days, 10:2delong% uptime
22:14 up 4 days, 8:54
Fourteen days? Four days? That’s the best you’ve got. Sheesh. I’m typing this note on a PC running Windows XP. I use it daily, it runs 24/7, and its current uptime is 25 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes. The last time I rebooted it was because I installed a third-party service that asked me to do so. I cannot remember the last time this system crashed.
I have a Tablet PC. I use it for an hour or two a day and hibernate it when I’m done so I can return to the same spot the next night. It hasn’t been restarted in over a month.
My office is built around a server running Windows 2003. Current uptime: 21 days, 18 hours, 4 minutes. I rebooted it when I replaced a hard drive a few weeks ago.
And Professor, here’s a lesson you might want to teach your students: Always go to the original source material. Here’s Scoble’s original quote, in context, from his blog:
I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot. Why do I do that? Because I’ve been using computers for 20 years and have learned that’s the best way to work.
This was a behavior I learned on System 7.0 back in 1992 when I was a page designer at San Jose State. It takes an extra minute in the morning to boot up, but that’s why I never hit this bug.
System 7.0? Wasn’t that a Macintosh operating system? Yep. Scoble learned not to trust operating systems to be reliable because he used to use a Mac.
Look, this OS triumphalism is truly pointless. Windows XP and Mac OS X are both extremely reliable operating systems. Both of them are also quite secure, especially if you understand the kinds of precautions to take. (Hint to Mac users: you might want to be careful where you browse with Safari and install the latest security updates.)
Ed Bott 
Ed:
Speaking of machines with lots of uptime between boots, do you put them on standby or hibernate when not using them (e.g. the one that has been up 25 days), or do you just let them run all the time? Is it a bit tough on the hard drives to leave them running constantly? [Note: I usually put my new computer on standby when I am away from it for more than an hour or so, but I used to let my old computer just stay on — it is over five years old and still runs like a champ.].
Thanks
Ken
I never use standby or hibernate on my main desktop machine. The hard drives are designed to run for a minimum of five years and in practice should last for decades. I suspect they would get more stress from being powered up and powered down constantly than from just spinning.
Anyway, I figure that before this drive is five years old it will be replaced by one that’s 10 times its capacity and 1/10th its price. 😉
Office computer running Windows XP Pro SP2 for 42 days and counting. Only reboots for patches and software installs. No hibernation for me or standby. I just lock it in the evening.
Ed, thanks for your response, which makes perfect sense to me (in five years, or less, I will have a new computer, as well as a new hard drive in that computer). In particular, I didn’t realize that these things were designed to run for a minimum of five years or longer.
Ken
I have two Windows XP SP2 PCs that are running 24/7 although they have to be rebooted every now and again because of updates from Norton Antivirus.. Then they just get rebooted and then used again.. Haven’t had any problems with my systems for a long long time. Usually I have at least one PC at home Folding@HOME when I’m at work.