Putting laptop to sleep vs shutting down

Hey Guys,

I just received my new Sony Vaio Z and just wanted to know what is better, leaving my laptop in sleep mode or shutting down at night. I really don't mind shutting down at night, as it starts up really fast anyways with the SSD. Some people have actually told me its better for the computer to leave it asleep, as shutting down and turning on a lot is damaging to the components. Is this true? What do you guys do?

 

Errr imo sleep mode is a bad idea since it's still using power, and afak if you have a power outage it might actually damage the components since you're supposed to have removed the battery to leave it on the plug all night.

 

Shutting Down your laptop may cause it to no last as long, but the difference is so small it is irrelevant. If you are not going to use the laptop overnight I would say shut it down so it uses no power. But leaving it in sleep mode wont hurt it either. My GF leaves her macbook pro on 24/7, she just puts it to sleep at night, she only shuts it down after a few weeks when it starts acting weird. Now a PC may not like being left on for a few weeks either. SO the choice is yours, shut down or sleep its no big deal. If you sleep it all the time and it starts lagging or acting strange, shut it down and turn it on again so the system resets. But I shut down my laptop everyday, I have a fast hdd and i can wait 30 seconds for the laptop to turn on, vs wasting battery and having to recharge the laptop sooner.

 

Off topic but could an Admin contact me? I am having some problems with my account and I cannot post anywhere but here. Thank you.

 

That is weird Turqoisegirl08, I can not PM you either... I will click the report post button on your post above ^^^
did you make any settings changes?
Glad to help!

 

Thanks JOSEA. I have a mod checking into it as we type

 

We are looking into it and we have a pretty good idea of what the problem is. It'll be fixed as soon as possible, sorry for the inconvenience.

For the record, but you all know this, it's been fixed.

 

So..... why not just put it in Hibernate mode? Sleep mode is what I use when I need to go from room to room or come back in a few.

When I leave school to go home I always throw mine in Hibernate mode just to keep everything open without the big power usage.

 

In sleep mode, the laptop uses very minimal power. My laptop can stay in sleep mode for several days before draining the battery. I only shut down my computer when I restart it for windows updates.

 

In my own experience, "sleep(S3)" works great for desktop usage!

Even when the machine gets powered off (by me or by power outage).

Still an open question for my laptop usage.

 

I turn it off for longer sessions, so like sleeping or go out to work or something.
But when home i just close it and it goes to sleep.
I don't like the waste of energy if i can do otherwise, even if it's minimal.

 

I only turn it off for restarts and whatnot, but I'm in college and don't pay for power, so take that with a grain of salt. PC's aren't going to be what's driving up your power bill anyway, and leaving them on isn't bad for them. College kids leave by the sleep function and their laptops last plenty long.

 

Even then, it costs less than a dollar a month in the cost of electricity to put your computer to sleep compared to turning it off.

 

Hmm, big fan of hibernate myself, as opposed to having to restart all my apps upon a fresh reboot

 

i rarely, if ever, shut down. Hasn't seemed to negatively affect any laptop ive owned

 

Stopped reading here.

My W7 laptop would start to act wonky after a few days of hibernating off/on. With W8, I sleep it during short intervals and hibernate during longer (2+ hours) ones. At the end of the day, I shout it down completely.

Workstations may be able to take continuous use, but consumer laptop don't fair as well in the stability department.

 

Consumer laptops do just fine. The OS is the issue here, not the hardware.

 

regardless of what is better technically, in my opinion, if you are using your laptop for 3-4 hours or so and there isn't any background works going on in your laptop. I would say it is best shut it down properly. especially when you have fast computer that starts up real quick, then why not

 

For a top line consumer laptop...maybe? But trying that with an entry level or even an intermediate model is just asking for trouble. OS notwithstanding, they're just not built for that.

 

I have a laptop here, it is a R051BX, it's a mini laptop with a AMD APU and it's low end, more low end as that is almost impossible the buy, it runs windows 7.
The laptop is never off, I mean literally, only sleep.
Maybe last time I turned it off was one month ago for a restart I guess.
And it happened more then only this laptop.

I never, I repeat have never problems with this laptop or any other and it runs just fine, or the laptop is broken (software,hardware).

So not shutting down should give problems?
I think there alot more people running computers complete weeks without shutting if off.

I think this should be a massive issue what you described....

Sometimes it is good to do a restart, after some certain updates it's kinda handy, but this mostly happens when a program is hanging or something like that, a browser that locks up, a game that crashed and your computer doing weird, then a restart should be needed mostly.

In normal day use a restart shouldn't be needed, I don't see any reason,

 

Some people have actually told me it's better for the computer to shut it down, as leaving it to sleep might be damaging to the components.
To be more precise, it was a guy inspecting my dead Fujitsu who said that leaving it on sleep a lot instead of shutting down might be the reason why it never woke up from sleep one day.

 

I believe the issue with leaving on in heat. I just had an Asus N61JQ graphics card die after almost 3 years.

It sometimes had boot up issues (win 7) and no SSD drive. The graphics is on the mother board and very difficult to change and was not worth it.

I haven't seen any discussion of heat from standby vs hibernation. On mechanical drives I understand starts up can be hard on them.

About to get an Asus N56VJ but with Win8 and with an SSD long start up times are no longer a serious consideration. However I do have lots of programs loading at start up besides just the OS but still should be much faster than the many minutes on the old laptop.

 

It is exactly the same. In sleep mode, everything shuts down except for the RAM, which consumes hardly any power.