dtgreene: * Shut it down completely
Shut it down completely. On my Windows 10 PCs, I routinely go to change the power option to disable "fast boot" which prevents the computer from shutting down completely. I also disable "hibernate" if there is such an option, as I don't want to keep any hibernate file around.
Yeah yeah my boot up times are somewhat longer then, who cares, I normally boot up the computer once a day, and with fast SSDs it doesn't really matter.
A friend of mine (actually my sister's husband) who is not that technically-minded, called me a couple of months ago, saying that he urgently needs help. He was supposed to start a MS Teams meeting with his clients (he has his own company) but his trackpad is not working so he can't move the mouse at all. (He didn't have an external mouse in use, not sure if it would have helped.)
So I was helping him by the phone, telling him how to navigate without a mouse (Alt, Tab, whatever is needed), we went to check the driver status in the control panel etc., to no avail.
Then I asked him "Have you tried to restart your PC?". He said "I have shut it down and started it again, but the problem doesn't go away.".
Then it suddenly hit me: "Oh, it is Windows 10? By default, shutting it down doesn't really shut it down properly but just puts it in that weird hibernate state so that it would start faster. Instead of "shutting it down", try to restart it instead."
He did, and the problem went away, and he could start his Teams meeting with mere minutes to spare, phew!
So, yeah. The default behavior of Windows 10 where it doesn't properly shut itself down means that certain problems can persist through the boots, UNLESS you separately restart the system once in a while (because only then it reboots properly).
All the more reason for me to change that stupid setting to properly shut the system down. At least it always clears that kind of stupid problems that my friend was having.
EDIT: The only computer which I keep running "24/7" (or at least for several days or even weeks) without rebooting or shutting it down is my Raspberry Pi4. I usually reboot it only if I run a system update like every few weeks (sudo apt update and sudo apt full-upgrade, and then reboot).
EDIT2: Oh, and the Android tablet and the phones, if you consider those as computers.