"How to increase the lifespan of old hardware"
Use it *gently* in a while. If it's not running, there's no livefspan at all. It's dead, anyway.
"How to increase the lifespan of hardware"
Let it run, day and night. Don't use power savings, keep the temperature constant.
Edit: An exception to the rule may be halting the CPU if it is idling, anyway.
Systems like DOS, Windows 3.1/9x do keep the CPU usage high, even there's literally nothing to do.
This may cause CPU fans to spin at the max and causing unnecessary heath generation in the CPU..
The worst someone can do to hardware is powering it down if it's not needed
and powering it up if needed (over and over again).
The concept of power saving may reduce the costs and lower the burden to power plants, but it' s not good for the environment.
From my point of view, this only accelerates the aging procesd of hardware. :
Power surges on power up do stress power supplies and the motors of HDDs and fans.
Power down causes overvoltage
Changes in temperature will make metal structures in chips and other components brittle.
That's like bending a piece of wire back and forth until it breaks.
Wayback in the 80s/90s office PCs were left running in the night. The CRT monitors were left powered on.
Instead of power savings mechanism, they ran screensavers.
This also prevented power surges in power plants.
After work, the power consumption did not change as dramatically as it does in modern times.
From my point of view, a lot of things go wrong these days.
Gratefully, these ugly power savings lamps are no more.
LED bulbs are still of ugly quality (no caps inside) and are vulnerable to power peaks,
but at least they don't contain environment unfriendly mercury. 😀
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
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