Restart Wear and Tear

[barr08]

I know I'm not the only one who restarts a few times a day, switching between os x and xp on their beloved mac. I have always wondered, however, if the very increased number of restarts an intel computer with boot camp goes through could damage the computer over time, or shorten it's life significantly. I know the startup process takes a lot of electricity and is very intensive on the computer and it's components. Any thoughts?

 

[840quadra]

Just think of it as running an intense application on the system. The wear and tear would be the same as running a program like iSquint, or something more hardware intensive.

Powering off and powering on, are the only things that I can think would wear things out quicker. That is because you are giving, and removing power to the circuits and capacitors on your system. A restart (where the power stays on the entire time) is much easier on most systems.