is there harm

Well hello everyone.

I have a question that i had for a while even with i had my Windows laptop.

Alot of my friends and i see people here too who either never turn off or they always let their computer to sleep and maybe turn it of once in a while maybe every 2 months.
The way i use my Macbook is in short bursts what i mean is, i turn it on use it for 2-4 hrs then turn it off go do whatever then come back again turn it back on and use it for another 2-4 hrs then shut it down by this time its sometime in the night so watch TV and go to bed.

So my question is: is there any harm in turning on then shuting down then back on again then back off..............and so on?

Is it better to let is sleep by closing the screen isntead of shutting down?

Any other benefits to letting it sleep other than it turns back on pretty quick?

thanks

Mactime said:

Well hello everyone.

I have a question that i had for a while even with i had my Windows laptop.

Alot of my friends and i see people here too who either never turn off or they always let their computer to sleep and maybe turn it of once in a while maybe every 2 months.
The way i use my Macbook is in short bursts what i mean is, i turn it on use it for 2-4 hrs then turn it off go do whatever then come back again turn it back on and use it for another 2-4 hrs then shut it down by this time its sometime in the night so watch TV and go to bed.

So my question is: is there any harm in turning on then shuting down then back on again then back off..............and so on?

Is it better to let is sleep by closing the screen isntead of shutting down?

Any other benefits to letting it sleep other than it turns back on pretty quick?

thanks

Click to expand...

I don't think it makes an awful lot of difference as long as you occasionally let the battery run down to around half charge every now and then.

The danger of letting it sleep when you are on the move is that if it wakes up whilst in a bag it could overheat, I always shut mine down if I'm transporting it in a bag.

btw, why have you got my car as your avatar.

Amen-Moses

edited to add that modern power supplies and regulators are better at coping with on/off transients than those of the past. It used to be wiser to leave them on back in the Triassic as continual on/off spikes would eventually fry something.

I always made it a rule to shut down my windows laptops, but I've had friends keep their iBooks and PowerBooks on for years and only shut it down when they had an update or something. They are still using those notebooks. Personally, I shut mine down at night, but keep it on for most of the day. I find it too tempting to get up at 3AM and surf the net for awhile, haha, so it's just easier to keep it off. So to answer your question, it's a personal choice. Windows laptops, yes, shut them off. They seem to have memory problems after awhile. Apple...not so much.

Trent out

Amen-Moses said:

I don't think it makes an awful lot of difference as long as you occasionally let the battery run down to around half charge every now and then.

The danger of letting it sleep when you are on the move is that if it wakes up whilst in a bag it could overheat, I always shut mine down if I'm transporting it in a bag.

btw, why have you got my car as your avatar.

Amen-Moses

edited to add that modern power supplies and regulators are better at coping with on/off transients than those of the past. It used to be wiser to leave them on back in the Triassic as continual on/off spikes would eventually fry something.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the replies guys.

Hmmmmmm the last i knew I have one of those cars in my garage a Chrysler 300 C SRT8 bright silver.

The reason people leave computers running constantly is that (or so the theory goes), it's much harder on mechanical components to constantly turn off and on than it is to just leave them running constantly. Like with your car (although this isn't a perfect analogy), starting up is the hardest part of your computer's day. In a car that's because it takes a long time for the fluids to completely circulate through the system. In computers, the simple act of starting up the drive motor puts added wear on the component. Unfortunately, this can't be avoided with laptops, but on desktop computers the theory is that for longevity's sake, it's better to leave them running.

I don't know how much I believe this, but this is what I've read over the years. Personally, I'd rather they not be consuming power constantly, so I turn them off when not in use. YMMV, but I haven't had too many reliability problems in any of my consumer electronics as a result.

Now, the other benefit to leaving a machine like a Mac running constantly and sleeping when not in use is so that you don't have to wait for the machine to boot-up cold. On Windows machines that do't manage memory as efficiently, this is a genuine problem. On Macs, being based on UNIX (which was designed to never be shut down), it's not such a big deal.