Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
quick question
- Thread starter DRL453
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
DRL453 said:
Leaving it on, not asleep, not allowing the hard drive or monitor to power down, will certainly reduce its life, because the screen and hard drive both have finite lifetimes. This is true of every computer. If you let the display and hard drive power down, the negative impact will be a lot less, but over time, yes, it will still have a negative impact on the computer. Look at servers -- they break, eventually. And parts need to be replaced. That's pretty much how it is with any computer hardware that runs 24/7, and notebooks are not really meant to be running 24/7/365.
What most Mac notebook users do is put their computers to sleep (close lid, or sleep by idle time), but never / rarely really turn them off.
Can you say more about what you want to do? Do you need to serve something from your notebook, so that you cannot turn it off? Or are you just wondering about sleep vs. power down? Also, FWIW, the powerbooks and iBooks wake from sleep very, very quickly, and the sleep / wake is very reliable... aside from specific issues I had (related to Bluetooth and Tiger), sleep has been almost completely reliable for me in the 1.5 years I've had my iBook -- not like my Win2k experience, where it worked really well at first, and slowly became less and less reliable.
Leaving it on all the time should be fine. Except for the hard drive and fan, it's a solid-state device so it shouldn't matter. You do, however, definitely want to set the LCD to sleep after a specified period of time, otherwise it will get darker over time. I leave my HD spinning, because I figure that it's better than having it spin up and down all the time. I regularly leave my PB on all the time and it's nearly 4 years old, for what it's worth.