8gb and sleep

ive read that some mbp owners, especially those with 8gb, just eave their laptops on sleep since this helps ram caching, which is reset everytime the unit is shutdown/turned on.
would this work for a win7 system also?

 

What are you trying to ask and what are you trying to do?

Obviously sleep mode keeps the ram active, so resuming is near instantaneous, with nothing lost. Just like hibernation, which takes more time as everything that was in memory needs to get back in there. OSX hibernates, but it is as part of sleep, so same difference there.

EDIT:

I just looked up ram caching and I *think?* it is just the OSX version of the page file. Do not worry about it. It does not by default delete when you shut down.

 

Of course it would work, why do you think it would not?

I either put my Vista laptop to sleep or shut down, my brother does the same with his Win 7 desktop. Hibernate is just writing the 'memory' files to disk rather than RAM.

I've used sleep even before I upgraded to 8 gigs, no problems at all.

 

If you get a DIMM modules with ASR (auto-self-refresh) support, that greatly lowers power consumption in sleep mode.
Because these modules could refresh on their own, memory controller switched off, with i7 this means CPU switched off completely. Only RAM is powered.

Also you can set down to 50% of total memory to be saved to hiberfil via powercfg. This could help the speed too (assuming not more memory was actually used by apps at the moment of hibernation).

 

actually what i was asking is whether there was an advantage to using sleep instead of shutting down, especially if you had a lot memory.
i read somewhere that mb users just put their laptops to sleep because it allows the computer to cache regularly used programs into memory. once the mbp is reset, the cache is lost and/or reset.
however i while thinking about it, it seems that win7's prefetch seems better than the mac's ram caching, since it preloads commonly used programs to memory upon startup and during use.

 

Superfetch won't restore whole cache after reboot (and it takes time/HDD usage anyway), so sleeping is better. Especially when a lot of data been cached (which almost always the case with lots of RAM).
Also obviously you save time on OS reboot, even if it tens of seconds with SSDs. Not to mention that it preserves the whole state completely, so it's handy when you was in the middle of doing something.

 

The only meaningful benefit is the faster shutdown / startup times when you open your laptop lid again. As you know, resuming from sleep is much faster than a cold power on and boot.

But there is no special benefit to sleep vs. shutdown just because you have 8GB of RAM.

 

thanks.
also another apple myth debunked.

 

However, that said, the obvious disadvantage is increased power consumption. I also vaguely recall a related question involving another disadvantage of operational issues. The issues involved sluggish operation that occurred from systems that were left on for months without being completely shut down (which was recommended in the article).

Although I have to admit that article wasn't that detailed (and was in reference to desktops) I can't really comment on whether this should still be taken into consideration anymore?

 

I personally experienced some slowdown issues after putting my computer to sleep all the time and never shutting down.
However, in such instances, I make sure to restart Windows and keep on doing my thing.
Restarting once every few days is recommended.

 

Not only slowdowns when leaving a computer essentially 'on' over a few days/weeks - but when using complex programs little bugs show up too (keyboard shortcut keys not working, etc).

I now keep the systems on/sleep as long as I'm directly working with them.

But, when I go to sleep - they're shut down (if they've completed what I need them to).

This issue is not so much an O/S problem as it is badly written software for our platforms of choice. If/when the software is written at a certain 'bullet-proof' level, then sleep can be the default method without any such slow downs/glitches.

 

I probably shut down my laptop once a week. Even when I transport it I only put it to sleep since it can stay like that for at least 24 hours. Sometimes I do hibernate it though. Either way, I don't really experience any slowdowns. Power savings of shutting it off/hibernate are miniscule.