Shutdown my Laptop? Why should I?

[David R. Litwin]

I have a year old Toshiba Intel Mobil P4 laptop using Sid. I recently downloaded two large files via BitTorrent. As I wanted to have them as quickly as I could, I decided to leave my laptop on until they were fully downloaded, rebooting only for upgrades. I noticed no real difference in performance (maybe Azureus was hogging a bit more memory after a few days).

The question is this: Why should I ever turn off my laptop on a normal occasion (normal being every-day, standard, stationary usage)? If I don't want it on, I can suspend it in some way: Waking-up is faster than booting-up.

I'm keen to hear your opinions, O members.

Cheers.

--
—A watched bread-crumb never boils.
—My hover-craft is full of eels.
—[...]and that's the he and the she of it.