Most of us tend to get about six hours of sleep at night, some more, some less. Have you ever thought about your Mac? Does it need top rest its little integrated circuits?

Well, it used to be said that powering off computers was bad due to thermal contraction (things expand when they get hot, contract when they cool off) - but those ideas seem to be a thing of the past for computers - so is there any good reason to turn off or to leave on your computer at night?

Actually yes, there is a darn good reason to leave them on at night!

Deep down in the bowels of the Mac OS X system lies the core of UNIX - UNIX you say - yes, UNIX - that age-old, trusted, venerable operating system started by Bell Labs before most people had hands-on experience with computers.

Mas OS X has many daemons -  not the type of nightmares, but the type of computer background processes that run at night -

What do these daemons do, you ask - well they are busy cleaning up fragmented files, cleaning up log files, making sure that the file system of your computer is healthy - basically, the daemons do the "housekeeping" tasks that need to be done.

Some daemons run every night, some weekly, some monthly, etc. You can even create your own - but for now, simply remember:

When you sleep or turn off your computer at night, these daemons don't get a chance to run, so your Mac can fill up with junk.

Happy computing