Should the computer be turned off or left in hibernate/standy by for long lifespan?

If you don't use the laptop for many hours or overnight, is it better to turn if off, or leave it in standby or hibernate mode? Some say it's not good to turn it off and on too often, but I thought if you leave it standby, something could happen as it's not completely off, some parts still running (still generating heat and has parts wear), but if it's completely off, nothing bad could happen.
Opinions?

 

I always switch off if I have to put a computer on standby for more than an hour.

 

If you leave it on standby, it will consume power and eventually drain the battery. Hibernate is fine though.

 

The on and off heat problem isn't an issue and really hasn't been since the 80's.

What is hard on laptops is sitting and running at 100% cpu load for hours on end. Many aren't designed for this and will bake.

Standby is fine, I leave mine on it like that all the time. My Sony Z505 is 11 years old, the V505 is 8 and my SZ is around 3, so wear and tear isn't an issue. The one problem with standby is if something wakes the laptop from standby while in the computer bag or sitting on a bed, this happened twice on my SZ because of some obscure setting allowing a program to wake and try to update. Luckily modern systems will thermal shutdown or throttle.

 

Battery or power consumption is not an issue. Just in view of the machine life.

 

So are larger laptops (as opposed to the light weight slim laptops) better handling it? And desktops much better? Are the size of the laptops relevant?

 

Every night I put my computer on "sleep" but when I'm going to be away for a long time I turn it off.

 

i turn mine on and off everyday. if it's going to be sitting idle for more than a couple hours, i turn it off.

 

I leave my desktop/laptop in sleep most of the time I'm not using them. A laptop, at least if it's running Windows 7, will wake itself from sleep and hibernate before the battery runs out. It's a non-issue.

 

Leaving your computer on is like having the fastest f***ing SSD in the world.

Just saying.

And power consumption is negligible with most consumer laptops. If it's a 800w desktop, might be worth it to turn it off. But laptops sip like 15w idle or something, completely irrelevant. Even less since the screen should be off.

 

I appreciate the replies, however, as I said, I'm not concerned about power consumption at all. I would like to know how it affects the lifespan of the computer. Is there any consensus or well accepted theory?

 

Unlike a human body that needs optimized 'on' (exercise) and 'off' (sleep) periods to be at it's peak, any electrical/mechanical system will have the longest lifespan when it is 'off' (assuming perfect storage conditions are met).

The tradeoff is that we want to use it for at least some of that time, while we have it. And balance all the heating/cooling cycles with the on/off cycles vs. the use/non-use cycles as best we can.

My personal strategy:

If I will possibly use it in the next 8 hours (and will definitely not use it after 8 hours... but will be there to turn it off at that time - ie. workplace) then I leave it running (not standby - simply running with screen off after 30 minutes, HDD/SDD off after 20 and any other specific components going to sleep except for the cpu, ram and gpu).

If I might possibly not need a specific system running - I leave it off until I need it. (I have 2 dozen or so systems to choose from. ).

If I am transporting a system greater than a 5/10 minute trip - it is off (especially true with SSD's or HDD's).

With SSD's in all of the notebook's I use, I have disabled sleep and hibernate because the power consumption is so low with Intel 320 Series SSD's (for sleep) and because hibernate is just a few seconds slower than a cold boot (in my use).

The overall goal is to not needlessly power cycle any system. Yet, at the same time, to not needlessly baby them either.

Note that I have several (desktop) systems that I leave on all the time. The only time they get restarted is because of updates (or when testing something on them...).

Comparing the 'always on' systems to the 'sometimes off' systems - the 'sometimes off' systems are more dependable in my experience - simply because (I believe) that they get shut down and re-started (not simply rebooted) more often.

I hope I have made my strategy as clear as it can be?

 

i only put my computer to sleep when I go to sleep(just to save a bit of energy) and hibernate when I need to take it on the road.

never switched it off deliberately. hibernate does put a slight 'stress' to the SSD but much more convenient than reboot(lots of things opened on the desktop).

 

For running at 100%? A desktop replacement will do better. Cheap "office" or typical "consumer" type laptops will handle it worse as many are designed for the cpu to run in bursts.

True, but completely pointless.

Electronics don't wear the same as mechanical components.
Even then, lamps are off so there is no wear there, fans are not running in standby either. The same applies to hard drives, which only leaves electronics.

Even cheap and high powered LED's last 50k hours or more, and hard drives are rated at 100,000 hours MTBF (even if MTBF is B.S.). 50k hours is over 6 years continuous service, so what exactly are you worried about? It could even be argued that shutting down is worse, since that heats up the system on startup, plus uses much more of the hard drive on startup.


Do you really care if your laptop lasts 25 years as opposed to say 10?
Like I said before, I have 2 that are over 8 years old, and I know of another IBM of similar vintage, all have used standby most of their lives.

 

No, not pointless: it's a baseline.

With the recent power related incidents with current SSD's; sleep and hibernate have been delegated to experimental status for me (back to Windows 95 days! yay!).

I agree that the older systems could 'take it' - but I'm not so sure with the newer ones. They seem somehow more fragile to me; definitely not 'better', reliability-wise.

I'm expecting everything to settle down around the Win8 SP1 time frame - then the O/S, the drivers and the generally available hardware will all be on the same (current) footing again.

 

That is because unlike older systems where everything was pretty dumb except may be the CPU + OS, modern systems are actually a combination of multiple complex mini computer system interact with each other(called it controller or chipset or whatever) and the reliability you mentioned are not a physical problem but simply BUGS. So sleep/hibernate would not 'shorten' the life of the electronics but more likely to trigger these BUGS due to corner cases.

 

I usually hibernate from day to day. Letting all comon applications i use open.

 

I've been running seti@Home on both CPU cores and on my GPU on my G50VT almost constantly for 6 months. So far so good

@Thread starter. It doesn't matter, the computer will probably last forever, Assuming temperatures are fine.
The only thing that will ever break is the hard drive (if you have a mechanical one, or write Terabytes to your SSD every week), screen inverter/bulb, battery and the laptop fan.

The chassis will likely break before the computer !

 

No, the capacitors spread throughout the various boards will start dying off long before that The kind used today have a finite lifespan even when they aren't defective chinese knockoffs.

 

Haha, as opposed real defective Chinese capacitors?

 

I just put my computer to sleep when I am not using it or travelling and shut down only when battery is super low. Hibernation is disabled for me since it's rarely useful and I get about 8 GB of SSD space back.

 

I'm not sure what the "power issues" are. I have a C300 in my desktop and Intel in my notebook, both without any issues. And in sleep mode, the drive isn't on anyhow and most still don't even have an ssd.

Newer is no more problematic than older systems.
I expect my SZ to last just as long as the others I mentioned earlier.

 

The 'power issues', LPM tweak for M4's, 320 8MB 'bug'... among others.

 

I always use the off button unless I have a good pressing reason to do otherwise. It just makes good conservation sense.

 

I have the power button set to hibernate, and I also enabled hybrid sleep. For the most part, I just close the lid to sleep the laptop, but will hibernate if I'm taking it down the street to a cafe or something. If I'm going to be travelling, I always turn it off.

 

I usually just leave my laptop on overnight idling since I'm usually downloading things and I miss stuff in IRC chats overnight, I switch to low power mode when I go to sleep so even if the screen for some reason decides to turn itself on it'll shut back off in 2 minutes (silly touchstrip is half broken and will somehow activate itself and wake up the screen).
My screen is probably on for ~9 hours a day though s:

 

Still not sure how this relates to this thread really.