My computer starts to get sluggish and need rebooting about every 10 days. It doesn't freeze or crash until day 15, but on day 10 I start to notice that its performance is lagging.

Whenever this happens, I get grumpy. Oh, grumble grumble, stupid lazy 5-year-old computer, I should replace it, grumble grumble always needs rebooting grumble grumble.

After a bit of grumbling, I heave a world-weary sigh and start closing all the programs to reboot. When I get to the point where I'm disconnecting my DSL, I finally remember that it has been running for 10 days. Then I get all proud of my computer. Ten days, frequent multi-tasking, running games while Outlook is still checking email once per minute, resource-draining DSL connection software, constantly running a distributed computing program, and it doesn't show any signs of weariness until it's been running for 10 days straight. Not bad for a five-year-old computer!