Most of the benefits come from it being always-on 24x7 but it won't hurt if it goes down from time to time

It'll run on Windows/Mac too but would be a manual installation

I personally recommend an old laptop with clean *buntu install, the built-in battery makes it much less likely the node gets corrupted. Since it uses neutrino a 4GB of RAM clunker with ~20GB of free disk should be adequate (would suggest an SSD at least though)