roothorick
Active member
It's no secret that the conventional wisdom here is you should only have your games on when you're playing them.
Do we have anything better than anecdotes and hunches to base this on? My gut instinct says that if the game is on for even a few hours a day, as long as it doesn't have defective capacitors or heat problems, the stresses of thermal cycling will quickly outpace any gains in useful life from the reduced running hours. In the realm of IT, this holds VERY true -- some people claim that simply leaving workstations on overnight reduces hardware failures by as much as a third!
So what makes arcade games any different? At the end of the day, it's the same materials in a different configuration. If you have your games on a lot (say, 4 or more hours a day), and don't care about your power bill (or, alternately, are presently relying on electric heat), why shouldn't you just leave them on?
Do we have anything better than anecdotes and hunches to base this on? My gut instinct says that if the game is on for even a few hours a day, as long as it doesn't have defective capacitors or heat problems, the stresses of thermal cycling will quickly outpace any gains in useful life from the reduced running hours. In the realm of IT, this holds VERY true -- some people claim that simply leaving workstations on overnight reduces hardware failures by as much as a third!
So what makes arcade games any different? At the end of the day, it's the same materials in a different configuration. If you have your games on a lot (say, 4 or more hours a day), and don't care about your power bill (or, alternately, are presently relying on electric heat), why shouldn't you just leave them on?
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