on or off?

[Cybergypsy]

Sleep all the way!!!!

 

[nutts]

I always sleep my MBP, and usually only reboot after updates. I don't think I ever shut it down completely.

In case any of you don't know, now that the MacBook and MacBook Pro have 'safe sleep', they take longer to go to sleep than some other machines, as they have to write the entire contents of your RAM to disk before sleeping.

That way if the battery runs out while asleep, they'll be in the equivalent of hibernate, waking up when given power again.

You can disable it from the terminal though, which I chose to do on my last MacBook to get back the 'instant' sleep I used to have on my iBook:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

 

[New Mac User]

You can disable it from the terminal though, which I chose to do on my last MacBook to get back the 'instant' sleep I used to have on my iBook:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

You'd think there would be an easier way to change that. In Windows you can specify different hibernation (safe sleep) or stand-by times from the control panel. OS X has to have something similar.

 

[eXan]

So what's the difference between OS X putting the hard disks to sleep (its default power mgmt setting) vs. turning it off?

Both cause the drive's heads to park and the platters to stop rotating.

Thats right, no difference. Thats why you'd better leave the HD running, if you dont want to loose your data of course. Also, if you have that option enabled, sometimes you have to wait for the HD to spin up, which is pretty annoying.

 

[iBookG4user]

I have always had my iBook and now my MBP go to sleep mode when I'm not using them and the battery on my iBook was at 89% capacity when I sold it and working great. I've had my MBP for 3 months and both the batteries are at 96% capacity. This is with leaving the laptops plugged in while I'm home and in sleep mode when I'm not using it at school.