Well, I don’t. I never switch off my computer and I never quit the utilities that are running on it all the time. There may be better reasons for this than I have, but these are mine: I use it 14 hours a day anyway, and to boot my 3.4 GHz Athlon 64 system from a cold state into Windows XP, with all the tools running, it takes 19 minutes, that’s no exaggeration. In this context, there’s something I absolutely hate: most applications, even small ones, have routines these days that run “regularly”. Many do automatic update checking, some do automatic backups, whatever. And guess what those brainy developers do? They run those processes at startup, somehow assuming that a satisfying regularity will come automatically that way.

Great. Crap, of course. Guys, don’t do that! It’s useless! Many people don’t restart your application all the time, so it just doesn’t work! And I’m sure those apps take their share of the 19 minutes boot time, because once they are actually restarted it’s something that happens only every few weeks, so all the update checks/backup/whatever take place at the same time. Who comes up with such an idiotic idea?