When I was a MacOS 9 user, I really did not pay much attention to uptime. When I left home, I turned the machine off, when I was home, it was on. I never had the need to turn the computer off in order to perform system cleanup as a regular task. When MacOS X came out, 'uptime' was all the rage on the forums that I frequented. People just jumped into the Terminal application and with the uptime command they could see how long their Mac was running without a shut down. Various forum members thus had contests to see how long their Mac worked without a reboot (or a Kernel Panic). This is where I entered the uptime craze.

When I got my powerbook - the same one that isn't functioning properly today - I kept it running for a long long time without reboot. I think my personal record was three or four months without a reboot. All this time, I did not really have any performance problems because I think that the cleanup processes were happening automatically. I later got some utilities to run the cleanup processes on demand, but that is another matter.

Anyway, since my Mac started not working properly, I generally turned it on when I needed to do some work, like type a paper, input data in an excel sheet, surf the net, and so on. About ten days ago I got lazy. I did not turn my computer off, I just put it to sleep. Today it started being slow and it took quite some time to switch applications and move from tab to tab in my browser. I decided to restart my Mac to clean it up, but before doing so, I checked my uptime...it was 10 days!

Now this is quite phenomenal considering the fact that my Mac is running in Safe Boot mode! Also, comparing my somewhat broken Mac in Safe Boot to a Dell GX280 with Vista: my Vista machine takes about 2 to 3 days uptime before it becomes as unresponsive as my Mac became today. Amazing!