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Can you damage a computer by rebooting too often? I'm planning to leave a machine automatically rebooting every 30 mins (scheduled shutdown task). It's a standard dell x86 running XP.

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In case anyone was wondering why, its not a good reason - serverfault.com/questions/117229/… – Colin Pickard Feb 26 '10 at 18:55
i've added an answer (and vbscript) over there to hopefully cut down on the number of reboots by NOT rebooting if the connection is alive. – bill weaver Feb 26 '10 at 21:31
@bill thank you! I'll leave this question open out of academic interest – Colin Pickard Feb 26 '10 at 23:18
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Booting up is pretty harsh on many of the components, but they're resilient enough that it's not really relevant anymore in this day-and-age.

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I would dare give the same advice even in 1990. or round that time, also. – ldigas Feb 26 '10 at 19:02
Warm reboots? Not so bad (maybe lots of hard disk wear). Cold starts? Much more troublesome. – Broam Mar 9 '10 at 17:04
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If your power supply is a bit dodgy constant reboots might damage some components. I've certainly had a dodgy PSU fritz motherboards on reboot before.

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