Sleep or Shutdown

[D_block]

Generally speaking, whats the best thing for pc's/laptops ? Is it best to shutdown or sleep . Does it post any treat to the laptop sleeping for long periods of time or does it just slowly drain your battery. I know usually the start up of machines in generally is more demanding that the constant running of it. so with the pc's whats the best thing to do ?

[Ponch]

Hibernate. If there is no security issue (different accounts, with passwords), hibernate is a good solution as the start time will be considerably shorter (shut down time will be a few seconds longer but that's not a problem as you don't have to stay in front of the machine). Still, Microsoft OSs need to be really restarted from time to time.

"Sleep mode" will drain your battery on a laptop and will still consume power on a desktop.

[Tripredacus]

My only complaint about Hibernation is that there does not seem to be a good hardware support for letting you know a PC is in Hibernate vs being off. This has caused many headaches for me as I move computers around a lot. Some do not like being unplugged when in Hibernate and plugged in again and woken up.

But I agree, Hibernation is better than sleep, but for my own computers (except my netbook) I do not use Hibernation or Sleep, only on displays and disks. The netbook doesn't seem to care if it gets unplugged while hibernating but that may have something to do with the battery.

I remember my first experience with Vista hibernating (it did it by default) but I thought it was off. Boy does it act funny when you replace hard drives or memory in a hibernating PC that you think is actually off!

[cluberti]

I generally sleep my laptops if it's going to be off for only a few hours, or up to a day. I've tested it and it takes a little over a week for a "sleeping" laptop to drain the battery on a Dell Studio 17, for what it's worth, but I wouldn't sleep a laptop for that long. If it's going to be off for more than just a few hours, I hibernate it as it is basically off. This is configured in the power options when I put a machine in S3 sleep - after 6 hours, it will automatically go to S4 (hibernate).

[puntoMX]

On my public computers I let the computers go into sleep mode (S3) after 5 minutes, basically just keeping the memory powered. This will save me a lot on my power-bill plus they start up in a few seconds .