Sleep or shutdown?

[MacPossum]

Okay, so I'm new with Apple laptops, I just bought my first one a few weeks fews ago for school (I'd always been the Apple desktop guy). I notice that most people, according to these forums, sleep their laptops instead of shutting them down. My question is, is there a benefit to sleeping your computer as opposed to shutting it down every day?

 

[swiftaw]

I prefer to sleep mine, then I don't have to wait for it to boot up when i need it again.

 

[Royale w/cheese]

Not including update reboots, I think I have shut shut mine down less than 10 times in over a year.

 

[CrzyCanuck72]

the benefit is that you don't have to spend time getting back to your previous setup... when I'm doing work, I usually have multiple PDFs, Word documents, and webpages open... it would be a huge hassle to get everything set up again after each reboot. I do do a full shutdown overnight once a week or so, because my MB gets a bit sluggish after that length of time.

 

[Gymnut]

An obvious benefit to sleeping your computer is that it'll be ready to use almost instaneously after waking as opposed to waiting for the computer to startup after a shutdown. Sleeping your computer supposedly consumes very little power. I guess the general idea is that it's better to leave your computer on and sleep it over shutting it down due to the fact that your computer will be subjected to "wear and tear" of shutting down and powering on. I'm not sure of whether this is scientific fact or not, but it seems to be the most common thing I've heard over the years.

 

[werkedm3]

There's just as much "wear and tear" putting the computer to sleep as there is shutting it down. There is really no reason to shut it down fully unless you know it is going to be in sleep mode for an extended period of time and it will be on battery power, since it does use some power to sleep.

 

[Gymnut]

http://lowendmac.com/ibasics/010523.html

Of course this was back in 2001..

Maybe someone with an electrical engineering background could answer this.

 

[Surfing@Blacks]

I always put my Macbook to sleep rather then shutting down. I hate having to startup the computer, wait till Dashboard to receive its information for my widgets. It takes a lot longer to open apps off a cold starup.

 

[aquajet]

http://lowendmac.com/ibasics/010523.html

There are a few relevant points -- don't blow smoke into the computer, avoid temperature extremes which could cause condensation. Most of it is complete and utter rubbish. The "give your transistors an 8-hour nap" made me laugh a little.

I've long since eliminated Low End Mac from my bookmarks due to the clowns that Dan Knight allows to "contribute" to his site.

 

[semaja2]

I put hibernation to instant on my brothers MacBook because he leaves it for longer periods...

However i think sleep is just a awesome feature and if you use the machine daily why not use it, it saves you time and you dont have to think about closing work down, i just close the lid and dont care what state my xcode/pages was in.

 

[NickD]

I shut down my comp at night, but have it set to automatically boot early in the morning so it's ready for when I wake up.

NickD

 

[Royale w/cheese]

There are a few relevant points -- don't blow smoke into the computer, avoid temperature extremes which could cause condensation. Most of it is complete and utter rubbish. The "give your transistors an 8-hour nap" made me laugh a little.

I've long since eliminated Low End Mac from my bookmarks due to the clowns that Dan Knight allows to "contribute" to his site.

The shut down situation may be relevant to older macs like in the sawtooth and gigabit ethernet era, it seems I have had a few problems with these sleeping sometimes and when waking up more prone to kernel panics or waking up to the multi language restart message. But while I still do have a few of these machines, they don't warrant me putting them to sleep anymore because of the amount of use they see.

The comment about LEM at first kinda of offended me as I am still a regular reader of their site. But then I realized I find most of their articles funny when they are kind of way off, so I guess you are somewhat right. I actually emailed an author of a recent article earlier this week, and I give him credit for actually responding to me, which was nice, but I did get the feeling he was not the well versed writer/mac enthusiast as he portrayed himself to be. I have corresponded with Dan Knight a couple of times too, he's an alright guy from what I have experienced.

But the occasional clown, after a thought, I would have to agree with you.

 

[mad jew]

A Mac runs certain maintenance tasks every day at very early hours of the morning. These tasks obviously cannot run when the machine is sleeping or shut down. However, since 10.4.2 the Mac has been able to catch up on these tasks the next time it is woken up. This isn't the case if the machine was shut down overnight instead. Unless you run your daily/weekly/monthly maintenance tasks manually or you happen to be on your machine at early hours of the morning, it's probably better to sleep your Mac rather than shut it down in this respect.

 

[siurpeeman]

A Mac runs certain maintenance tasks every day at very early hours of the morning. These tasks obviously cannot run when the machine is sleeping or shut down. However, since 10.4.2 the Mac has been able to catch up on these tasks the next time it is woken up. This isn't the case if the machine was shut down overnight instead. Unless you run your daily/weekly/monthly maintenance tasks manually or you happen to be on your machine at early hours of the morning, it's probably better to sleep your Mac rather than shut it down in this respect.

i never knew this. how does one do this manually?

 

[mad jew]

Well you can either get a third party app to run them for you (like Cocktail), or you can use Terminal with the following:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

You'll need an administrator password.

 

[siurpeeman]

Well you can either get a third party app to run them for you (like Cocktail), or you can use Terminal with the following:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

You'll need an administrator password.

that's really interesting. thanks, mad jew. i also just found an apple support page that tells exactly the same thing.

 

[mad jew]

No worries mate. Looking through the Apple page it seems they give slightly different code, but it'll get the same results.

 

[jaycyn94]

out of curiousity, how long will a MBP sleep (on a full battery) before it conks out? Also, if that happens, does it actually shut itself down cleanly before running completely out, or does it just turn off?

 

[Papajohn56]

Doesn't shutting it down or restarting clear the memory and gives a better "fresh start" than just sleeping

 

[kolax]

out of curiousity, how long will a MBP sleep (on a full battery) before it conks out? Also, if that happens, does it actually shut itself down cleanly before running completely out, or does it just turn off?

Not sure how long it lasts, but I think it goes into hibernation mode. That's what happens when you run out of battery when using it anyway.

 

[lofight]

I shut down my comp at night, but have it set to automatically boot early in the morning so it's ready for when I wake up.

NickD

Wich program automaticly boots your mac at a hour, or is it a code in terminal?

 

[iToaster]

out of curiousity, how long will a MBP sleep (on a full battery) before it conks out? Also, if that happens, does it actually shut itself down cleanly before running completely out, or does it just turn off?

I've never run my MBP down to death on sleep, but if you get it into emergency sleep (almost no battery power) it will last for about 5 hours. Without a plug in overnight it takes about 20 min. to charge when I'm using it. If the battery does die while in sleep, the next time you plug it in and turn it on, you will get a white screen, then a progress bar at the bottom. What is all this? Every time you sleep the computer it copies the RAM onto the hard drive (don't move it until the light begins to pulse, that indicates that is is done) incase you pull out the battery (convenient on long trips with more than one battery where you don't have to turn it off), or the battery dies. Upon you pressing the power button when electricity is restored to the computer, at this time it discovery the RAM copied onto the hard drive and copies it onto the actual RAM, and then everything is just as it was. And I for one, have preferred to have my MBP sleep as opposed to turn it off.

Wich program automaticly boots your mac at a hour, or is it a code in terminal?

In system preferences, under energy saver, there's a little button with "schedule" on it... that does it.

 

[pna]

deep sleep widget

I find that it's often handy to actually hibernate my mbp to disk rather than just cause it to sleep if I'm going to be away from it for a while. The benefit of this is that it combines the benefits of both shutting down and sleeping. It writes the memory contents to disk, so when you start up you're back in the same state you were as when you put it into hibernate mode. It uses no power, though, as the entire machine truly shuts off. Starting up from a hibernated state is slower than from a sleeping state, but is still a fair bit faster than a cold start from shutdown.

There's a widget called 'deep sleep' which makes this feature easily accessible. I probably use it once a week or so, and it works great.

http://deepsleep.free.fr/

 

[mad jew]

Doesn't shutting it down or restarting clear the memory and gives a better "fresh start" than just sleeping

It does clear the memory, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Remember that the purpose of memory is to store information that will mean the computer doesn't then have to read the much slower hard drive. Having data in the memory is a good thing. Clearing memory isn't inherently bad, but it kinda defies the point of memory in the first place.

 

[DoFoT9]

I find that it's often handy to actually hibernate my mbp to disk rather than just cause it to sleep if I'm going to be away from it for a while. The benefit of this is that it combines the benefits of both shutting down and sleeping. It writes the memory contents to disk, so when you start up you're back in the same state you were as when you put it into hibernate mode. It uses no power, though, as the entire machine truly shuts off. Starting up from a hibernated state is slower than from a sleeping state, but is still a fair bit faster than a cold start from shutdown.

There's a widget called 'deep sleep' which makes this feature easily accessible. I probably use it once a week or so, and it works great.

http://deepsleep.free.fr/

ive been using this widget for a while now, it works wonders!!! it helps to save battery life. i used it at night time when i didnt want to waste the 5-10% battery life that got drained from ram overnight.. and in between computer classes it also helps to safe a good 10-15% per day.. that comes in very handy. it also ensures that the computer is asleep and there is only one way to wake it up and no other buttons can wake it up accidentally.