General Question about Notebook Idling

Hi, I heard somewhere that computer does not need rest and is recomended to be turned on 24/7, only to be hibernate when not in use. I also heard somewhere that computer should be turn off for rest.

So, what is better for the system?
Turn off every night...
Restart every night...
Hibernate every night...
Screen Saver every night...
Leave it on every night...
Or, a combination of the above?

Thanks.

I am talking about the computer not the LCD (obviously to turn it off when not in use for a long time!)

 

well, in a mac ur are recommended to put your computer to sleep (standby in windows). with windows xp this is not the case; ur computer needs to be turns off if it is not used. with windows xp; if the computer is put to standby; when it wakes up the system is not so stable as before. and needs to be restarted. so yes; ur notebook need to be turn off while not in use. (e.g. when ur asleep; whenever that is ).

when windows vista comes out; it has a "turn off" mode; which is very similar to mac "sleep" and you are recommended to put ur windows vista computer to sleep (via "turn off" not "shut down")

edit: i would like to add; if u don't use ur computer and does not use any power saving such as keeping the screen or hard disk or even the fan running while u don't use ur computer for extended period of time (e.g. when ur asleep) it will reduce the life of the parts because of wear and tear.
however, it is a good idea to leave your computer on if u are just taking a short stroll (no longer than 30minutes.. or maybe up to an hour at max; depends on ur liking)

 

What, sometimes I leave my S96J on for day or two on without shutting it down or standby. Its usually on all day anyways without going into standby. It should be fine.

Standby though is more stable than hibernate, thats why I have it disabled.

 

can i clarify; concerning stability; ur computer does not need to be turn off; turning the computer on for a long time is alright; but if u put it to standby or hibernate; the computer usually wakes up a bit weird; and needs to be restarted.

i was refering to "in general" and power consumption also.

 

My V6 has been on for about 4 months without a reboot.


I Hibernate it when I need to move it around, then when its stationary, just boot it up, and I'm where I was in less then 20 seconds

 

Hahaha, that's beautiful.

~ Brett

 

Yea, my Windows is very slim, I barely have anything running, unless need be. And when I'm done, it's closed down. But cleaning the registry, recycling bin and pretty much constant scanning and defraging does wonders.

 

I would advise AGAINST turning it on/off too much... as that can add wear on the hard drive because it'll have to spin up/down often.
I pretty much leave my computer on 24/7... except when I have to move from home to school; that's when I use hibernate.

 

Ahhh, conflicting opinions...

Any one has any solid evidence to which one is more preferred for the well being of the notebook?

I am sure I can leave my notebook on for, let's say, years without turning it off...but is that healthy? There's no feedback system like our body where lack of sleep mean ... you get the drift.

Your notebook may look find (because it works) but what about internally due to 24-7 turning it on?

 

If you leave your laptop on 24/7 make sure you get a decent cooling pad...

 

Yeah, however, I do not have one.

Anyway, whats the different between stand by and hibernate precisely? I keep hearing hibernate is bad?

 

Hibernation is saving the memory contents to disk and shutting down so that the next time you boot up, you get your desktop as it was before. Standby is just powering down some devices such as LCD and HD to save power, but the computer will still be running.

 

I do pretty much like one poster above, only hibernate to transport the notebook betweek home and work. I restart roughly once every one or two weeks, because after many hibernations, the system will get a bit sluggish. I personally believe that hibernation puts a lot less strain on the HDD than the normal shutdown / bootup sequence. Also, it's a lot faster; I don't get coriolis' 20 seconds, but in around 30 my desktop is back on the screen.

It's really not true that you need to restart after every standby or hibernation due to the OS becoming "weird" (at least not in my case)

 

I think it's unlikely that hibernating puts less stress on your computer or hard drive than a shutdown or boot. Hibernating puts the exact image of your RAM on the hard disk during shutdown and reloads it upon booting. That's (for most people) at least 1 gig being written and deleted every cycle. While I can't say how much writing or deleting happens during a normal boot or shutdown, I can't imagine it's a whole lot more if any.

~ Brett

 

Ok, I'll grant that my statement is arguable. But consider that the 1gig file is (almost or entirely) contiguous, while that during shutdown and boot a lot of RWhead movements take place.

So, even though there is less data written and read, because that data is more dispersed, the HDD makes more transversal movements. These, I think (without being sure) that are the main factor in the wear of a HDD. The spin is a continuous motion that doesn't introduce vibrations, transient dynamical regimes etc. The electromagnetic read/writes themselves... I don't know but I would tend to say they are not the limiting factor in a HDDs life - i.e. something else will probably break down before the surface is too worn to support further readwrites.

So that is the reasoning behind my argument.

 

This is interesting. I hibernate for travel and during the night.
Is it more ideal to leave it running overnight? (at least according to E.B.E. and coriolis...?)

Edit:
I'd like to add that, personally, I have not had any 'wierd' problems with coming out of hibernation. I should note that my experience with hibernation only dates back to maybe Nov2006.
I have, however, had issues with coming out of standby (screen remains off). (this issue seems pretty common in this forum, if I recall correctly)

 

I'd say use hibernation, but it may also be the case that leaving it on during the night won't affect its lifetime significantly.

I've been using hibernation for at least 3 years, and I never had any major issues with it. Well, once I tried to resume from hibernation after I added more RAM to the computer, and I got a BSOD but that's understandable, the size of the hiberfile didn't match that of the RAM any longer.

 

Either way you should be fine. I've used both quite a bit with the rare problem from each. I'd say just use the one that suits your needs best and don't worry about how it will affect the life of your computer.

~ Brett

 

The idea that standby or hibernate is somehow inherently unstable on a PC is baseless at best... if you do have problems coming out of standby or hibernate, it is most likely due to specific driver or hardware issues.

1. Keeping your computer on:

• Uses more power - typically 10-20W is used even while idle, depending on your system's hardware. This, of course, costs more money (though not that much - maybe about $10/year).
• May increase wear and tear on components - mainly mechanical ones like fans and hard drives. Both of these, however, may be able to slow down or turn off - a fan typically reduces speed if temperature goes down, and a hard drive can be set to turn off via the XP power settings after some idle period. Personally, I don't feel the useful lifespan or operation of your components is affected as long as you maintain the computer well - e.g. keep dust out of the vents and heatsinks and the area around the laptop well-ventilated and make sure you have clean, consistent power with proper grounding.
• Means it is always 'ready-to-use' with no waiting period.

2. Standby

• Uses minimal power - up to about 2 watts. If you're on a fully charged battery, your laptop can stay in this mode for over a day without running out of power.
• Shuts all components off with the exception of a few - it maintains power to system RAM and associated circuitry needed to come back online. There is no significant wear and tear.
• Is a little more risky if you are going to choose to transport the laptop during this time - if the battery disconnects, you must reboot entirely and may lose open files. I should note that I haven't had problems transporting my laptop in standby, even while travelling on an airplane.
• Comes back to usable status within several seconds at most, because it does not need to read the contents of RAM from the hard drive. Certainly this is the easiest way to save power and still keep the laptop ready at a moment's notice.

3. Hibernate

• Uses no power. The system is equivalent to shut off in terms of power use. Unlike with standby, you do not have to worry about the power eventually running out if you're using the battery, so this is more suitable for longer stretches of time when you're not using the computer.
• Writes all contents of RAM to your hard disk. If you have 1GB of RAM, 1GB of hard drive space must be reserved at all times to allow the system to hibernate. This may or may not be a significant amount of space to you.
• Transporting the laptop this way is no different than having the power turned off, so there's no worry about losing open files or rebooting entirely if power gets disconnected - unless your hard drive decides it would like to corrupt itself in the time it is hibernating (not likely most of the time)...
• Typically takes around 15-20 seconds to recover, but it may take up to a minute depending on the speed of your hard drive and on whether the hibernation memory file is fragmented. It should still be much faster than booting normally.

With respect to the effect of constant on-and-off cycling of the hard drive, remember that if you just leave the hard drive on, it is also continuously spinning and still causing wear on the motor and other parts. I don't think that this is any better or worse than a few spinups/spindowns a day or cold/warm cycles. That being said, if you're going to leave the laptop sitting for only a few minutes idle, don't bother shutting it off. Do set the timer in power settings to shut the hard drive and screen off after some period of time (15 minutes if you'd like) if you're planning to leave the computer on all day and night.

I leave my computer on overnight but mainly it is to keep my IM services open (MSN, ICQ). If the computer isn't doing anything overnight, I would lean towards leaving it on standby to save power and to reduce wear and tear.

 

Thanks for the compilation of analysis, all of you. It seems to be that standby is, let's say, better than complete shutdown. Of course, you should always restart occasionally to restart the RAM and such.

To discuss further on, does anyone have any pertinent issue concerning coming back from hibernation?

So far, standby is better at resuming computer instantly and worst at transporting, while hibernation is good for transportation and worst at, well, coming back fully 100% power.

 

I don't know where you're getting your information but that's complete BS. I have Linux servers that get restarted about twice a year on average.

 

The irony is I get my info from threads. Perhaps, is it different in window than in linux? I don't know. Everything is different when comes in electricity and capacitor.

 

He's talking about the failure of Windows and programs to deallocate memory after they've been closed. These memory leaks build up over time and you need to restart the OS to free up your RAM. Yeah, it's inherent to Windows...much less in Linux and non-existent in UNIX.

 

You don't need to restart UNIX servers unless you are doing major maintainance like upgrading the OS. Windows is another story. Because of memory leaks, windows servers have to be restarted often to purge the RAM XD! I have been working with both SUN Solaris and Windows 2003 servers. The SUN Solaris is still up and running for nearly 2yrs now without any downtime. The Windows 2003 server however demanded a cold boot every 3-4 months =/

 

In that case it largely depends on what programs you run. My Windows servers (2000 and 2003 server) have also gone months without restarting. However, most Windows critical patches (released monthly) require restarting where as with Unix and Linux you rarely have to restart. On my desktop I haven't ran into any memory leaks with XP Pro SP2 itself. Like Coriolis stated Windows XP is perfectly capable of running for months at a time. Vista would be a completely different story though since it's still rather new.

My advice is to restart it when it starts acting up. Better yet, find which programs are causing memory leaks.

 

For me the twice in one year average for Linux includes once for power outage lasting longer than the UPS and once for a kernel upgrade. You must be running much more demanding stuff than I am. All my Windows servers do is AD, file, and print.

 

File, Print, SPAM Filtering & Terminal services for the winblows 2003 The SUN crunches numbers day and night and run critical databases ><; UNIX is more robust than Linux

 

When it comes to hibernate, standby, shutdown, I do not think that one is better than the other. These power states cannot really be compared. Each has its own unique function.

A standby does not substitute a hibernate and vice-versa.

An issue with hibernate that I can think of is that memory leaks are taken forward to the next time you resume your windows session. This is because the current state of the system, RAM contents, contents of the page file etc are preserved and resumed exactly as they were.

 

Just to nitpick: Shut Down / Restart would be "worst" at coming back fully (assuming you mean worst in terms of time required...)

 

Also worst in terms of battery consumed to shutdown and bootup on battery if you're on the go.

In terms of battery:
1. On short term (up to hours) standby is best, since it doesn't eat much battery (still it's not so efficiently implemented in XP so it will eat some battery).
2. On longer terms (hours - days) hibernate is best.

Shutdown/`cold' OS boot is worst in all cases, since it eats the most power (taking the longest, putting most strain on components).

 

Sorry for the confusing statement. When I say that standby is better than hibernation I mean...not to compare the one to another, in lieu, to say that stand by is better to put my notebook to sleep at night than hibernation based on its function. Of course, during transport, hibernation is much better than standby/shutdown. Shutdown = eats a lot of battery when powered-on.