Maybe if you are running a 386 processor.

This is not how computer hardware works. Their components get wear out by power cycles, not by the time they spend in use. So if you want them to last longer, you should limit the frequency of shutdown/boot cycles.

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Of course. Would you remove your mailbox each time you go to sleep or leave your house? Or unplug your phone?

And there are other users for this server, they probably would not be happy if they could no longer fetch their mails when I am sleeping, or if the music stream they are listening to was randomly cut each time I need to go out.

Hibernate pretty much exclusively since I discovered the option. I'll restart every so often to clear the decks but I basically never shut down or boot the computer completely from scratch.

Usually, dry my laundry on it) custom socks, boxers, etc.

One little trick for hibernation on Linux:

If you enter the following as root:
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
or as a normal user with sudo privileges:
$ echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Then hibernation and resume from hibernation will b3e faster. Furthermore, it the system fails to hibernate, this command (either one, as they do the same thing) may allow it to.

(Alternatively, you can write 3 to discard even more. Also, using "sync" before doing this may allow for more memory to be freed.)

As for what the command does:
* Linux (like all modern OSes) keeps a disk cache in RAM. Normally, this is a good thing, as it reduces the amount of disk accesses needed in normal operation.
* However, when hibernating, this extra cache needs to be written to the swap partition (Linux hibernates to a swap partition, as opposed to Windows using a special hibernation file that is not used as swap). This is wasteful, as anything in the cache can be easily re-created, and the computer would have to load it again to resume from hibernation.
* By writing to this file, you are telling the kernel to drop the cache, which will therefore not cause it to be saved to disk. This means there's less to be saved by hibernating.
* The drawback of doing so, of course, is that the system will need to re-load the data that was cached from disk if it's accessed, which may slow things down a bit right after resume.

(I'm wondering why the kernel doesn't drop caches on hibernation by default, since it would make sense to do so.)

I usually put it to sleep during the day when not using it, and turn it off completely for the night.

I sit watching it stupidly for about 2 minutes, then I turn it on again.

Turn off. Eletricity is not free.

a bot downvotes the posters on a list

If i'm gone for less than an hour, it sits idle. The screens and the one still present HDD will be turned off after 5 minutes in the lock screen, but other than that I have not enabled additional power saving modes.
If I am away for more than that, it gets shut down.
When i am done for the day, additionally it gets turned off completly with a switchable powerstrip. Otherwise various LEDs insist of being lit up the whole night.

Could you elaborate? I actually assumed you were going to ask/talk about Folding, something I did with an older comp. Folding is letting your idle computer be used to help scientific research.

Even when off it is drawing power. Generally enough to keep the ram refreshed and power USB ports.

it is cheap enough at least until the reactors run

Given the cooling issues my desktop has, I would not want to run something like folding@home on it. If I did, the CPU would throttle, reducing performance (and hence the amount of work the computer gets done) to unacceptably low levels, and after a while it would just shut off abruptly.

No.

The reason the computer has to boot each time is that RAM's contents are lost n power-off; the boot process has to initialize the hardware and load the OS into RAM.

Some motherboards might be able to power USB ports while off, but none of my current devices can. (My small laptop can definitely provide such power while asleep, however.)

I found the slowdown was too much while I was actually using the computer, so I'd disable it. However, I let it run while I was asleep, or at work, or whatever, without problems.

In any case, money is tighter now, so I never reinstalled the software on newer comps.