Shutdown vs Sleep

[s1akr]

Most of you have probably read or have participated in a similar discussion before in the past, but earlier tonight I experienced, what I thought at the time, a technical difficulty with my mba that left me with a question that I do not have the technical knowledge to answer, so here I am turning to you.

I received my mba in the mail about two weeks ago, and since I have only shut it down twice. Once on a system update on the day I received it, and the other just five minutes ago. This last shutdown took a good 5 minutes, and I'm not exaggerating; 5 minutes, if not more. It took long enough for me to close the lid, went outside to smoke a cigarette, came back and the screen was still light blue with a "loading" animation toward the center bottom of the screen. I finally got tired of waiting and left it alone with it's lid closed and watched a program on hulu before checking it again. Then, it wouldn't turn on. I hit the power button and nothing. I held it down; nothing. I had to hit the power button with my mba connected to the power source before it would turn on. The battery wasn't dead; it had over 90% left. But, when I did it again, the shutdown was instant...less than a second, and the boot up took less than 5 seconds.

So, it got me thinking... My mba boots soooo fast, is it beneficial to always keep my mba on sleep? I can live with a 5 - 10 seconds wait before I get to use my computer. Does it hurt or decreases the lifespan if I shutdown and boot up on a daily basis? Which brings me back to the discussion I'd like to start on this thread....again for most of u

Shutdown or sleep? Which do you do, and why?

Technical explanations or mere opinions....all are welcome. More the merrier.

 

[fswmacguy]

I owned a Mac desktop prior to getting the MBA (I now completely use the MBA for everything), so I was in the habit of always shutting down. Don't know why- probably dates back to the Windows 98 days when you were always supposed to put the computer on shutdown; putting it on standby was a defiance of the PC gods. Or perhaps if you put it on standby it never woke up until you hard powered it down and back up.

Anyway- I use shutdown simply because 1) I know everything is off on shutdown, and 2) the MBA boots in less than ~15 seconds.

 

[Steve121178]

Shutdown at night, during the day I'll just put it into sleep mode between uses.

 

[Hellhammer]

I shut down only if something is forcing me to do it (update, leaving for +24 hours). Sleep is so much faster and all apps are already running

 

[GGJstudios]

If you want more information, here are just a few of many threads on this topic, found by searching the forum with MRoogle:

Do you shut down your Macbook Pro when you are not using it ...
sleep or shutdown on mbp
Question: Sleep or Shut down
Better to sleep or shutdown?
Sleep or Shut Down?

 

[WLandrenea]

Skyping with lid closed

My wife just purchased the Mac Pro. I travel alot and skype nearly every night. This new Pro, when you close the lid, it kicks us off the internet..Is there a way to disable this so that she can skype at night and not worrying about falling asleep with the lid open?

 

[GGJstudios]

My wife just purchased the Mac Pro. I travel alot and skype nearly every night. This new Pro, when you close the lid, it kicks us off the internet..Is there a way to disable this so that she can skype at night and not worrying about falling asleep with the lid open?

Mac Pros don't have lids, since they're desktop computers, so I'm guessing you mean MacBook Pro. It's no harm to leave the lid open all night. You can simply sleep the display, so it goes dark, but leaves the Mac running. You can also use Caffeine to keep it from going into sleep mode.

 

[Hellhammer]

My wife just purchased the Mac Pro. I travel alot and skype nearly every night. This new Pro, when you close the lid, it kicks us off the internet..Is there a way to disable this so that she can skype at night and not worrying about falling asleep with the lid open?

I think you meant the MacBook Pro as Mac Pro does not have a lid. Anyway, she could use InsomniaX though then the MBP would remain running through all night, I think.

 

[equiprimordial]

I never shutdown my MBA and I don't see any reason to do so.

 

[gdeputy]

For the last at least 5 years I've never shutdown a PC/Laptop unless I HAVE to (i.e. installing software for a restart).

 

[jabbawok]

I haven't shutdown my 11" MBA since the day it arrived from apple.

Incidentally I only shut down my MacPro when I'm away for at least a week.

I suspect OP's super slow shutdown and subsequent failure to boot was some PMU issue, perhaps he should look at the error logs for that shutdown and see if there is some indication of what caused it to behave in such a manner.

 

[flatfoot]

shutdown at night, during the day i'll just put it into sleep mode between uses.

+1

 

[s1akr]

I haven't shutdown my 11" MBA since the day it arrived from apple.

Incidentally I only shut down my MacPro when I'm away for at least a week.

I suspect OP's super slow shutdown and subsequent failure to boot was some PMU issue, perhaps he should look at the error logs for that shutdown and see if there is some indication of what caused it to behave in such a manner.

Where do I go to check the error logs?

 

[equiprimordial]

Where do I go to check the error logs?

Try the Console application in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.

 

[s1akr]

Whoa! Way too technical for me.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

my MBA as SSD-based portable computer I still shutdown. Not sure if true but I assume that writing the 4GB memory file to disk during sleep/hibernate will stress the SSD unneeded. The little beast boots so fast I don't mind the few seconds more to wait. And yes: its still part of the SSD degeneration paranoia.

My "older" MBP I put in sleep most of the time while transporting short distance.

My iMac mostly goes to sleep/hibernate as I don't care about the disk degeneration while writing the 12GB memory file to hard disk.

 

[gwsat]

Unless there is a specific reason to do so I never shut down my MBA, or my MBP for that matter. For example, I last rebooted the MBA 10 days ago. The only glitch I see with my MBA is that it sometimes doesn't let me control the keyboard and trackpad for about 15 seconds after I open it up, although the screen lights up instantly. After that, though everything operates perfectly.

I prefer to limit my reboots because I seem to have fewer unexpected problems with VMware Fusion in Unity mode and Windows 7 when I shift from Unity mode to Windows in full screen and shut down Windows before I shut down OS X. It's not strictly necessary to do this but I know that I can avoid problems when I do it this way.

 

[miata]

I shut down only if something is forcing me to do it (update, leaving for +24 hours). Sleep is so much faster and all apps are already running

Same here. I only reboot when when forced by updates and that is one reason why I don't use Safari. I only shutdown when doing hardware upgrades.

 

[Mr. Savage]

I shut down a couple times a week just in order to get back RAM that certain apps ( Safari for example ) like to gobble up and not entirely give back upon closing.

 

[Mike84]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Sleep. Haven't shut down.

 

[gwsat]

I shut down a couple times a week just in order to get back RAM that certain apps ( Safari for example ) like to gobble up and not entirely give back upon closing.

Chrome used to sometimes hog huge amounts of my MBP's RAM and the only way to clean it up was to reboot. For some reason, though, I haven't seen the problem on my MBA. It's a good thing, too, because VMware Fusion and Windows 7 are memory hogs.

 

[pelle.jansen]

my MBA as SSD-based portable computer I still shutdown. Not sure if true but I assume that writing the 4GB memory file to disk during sleep/hibernate will stress the SSD unneeded. The little beast boots so fast I don't mind the few seconds more to wait. And yes: its still part of the SSD degeneration paranoia.

Correct me if I am wrong but I think that with sleep the content of the memory gets preserved because the memory keeps being powered and most other components power down(including the SSD). And not like hibernate writing memory to disk and shutting everything down. I have my MacBook Air(2.1) now for 2 years, and have never turned it of. Always had it on sleep and have no signs of SSD degeneration.

There may even be less stress on the SSD when sleeping because there is not the constant writes of booting up but I don't know if booting up writes a lot.

Hope it helped

Regards,