My last university leaves most of their macs on 24/7. I generally shut them off on a Friday night when I could. And likewise I often need to leave my comp on all night to process video which can take 16-26 hrs (wish I has a G5! It's suppose to do it in a third of the time with the data bus 8x faster & faster cpu.) Likewise many graphic businesses leave theirs on 24 hrs. I heard yrs back about what et voilà said about not being good for a comp to be powered on & off. Whilst I don't know about the HDD being dynamic doing damage, it sounds right, but I read somewhere (probably just something to write about) that a static HDD can cause wear as well (whilst the comp is on.) I've been thru one HDD, but I had difficulty with it 6 mths after I got the comp anyway so I suspect it was a bit of a lemon!

From what I can gather Macs are designed to be pretty hardy in that respect.

Misnamed & custom put-together files are a great annoyance to everybody. Particularly when they're large in nature. There 'are' people who do it deliberately. It makes you wonder why! You just have to keep trying if there's alternative offers out there.