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Is it safe to leave my MBPro on for more than a day?

mohammad

mohammad

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 7, 2008
55
0
Netherlands
Hi,

Sometimes I leave my MBP on for a full day or even more? is this practice safe or will I damage my MBP's lifetime? When I say on.. I mean connected to the adaptor and left on and not going to sleep..

I've to say.. I did the same thing to my old Laptop which was a Fujitsu and after 2 years my motherboard burned out!!

If such a thing happens to my MBP will the Applecare guarantee cover it? Of course I'd have to extend it to 3 years.

Thanks
 
Shouldn't be a problem.

You could set it so your screen goes off after say 15 mins or an hour - even that you don't need to do...
 
Mine has been on for four days straight serving as a jukebox. I have the display to turn off after 10 minutes.

Haven't had a single issue.
 
Mine has been running 24/7 with reboots for updates for the past 9 months.
 
Mine stays on all the time as well.

I find though after it being on for bout a week without a restart the Trash window won't open in finder when i click on the dock icon.

Anyone else encountered this?

I can still empty trash by left clicking the icon but the finder window will not open until i restart, it will then function as normal.
 
mohammad said:
Hi,

Sometimes I leave my MBP on for a full day or even more? is this practice safe or will I damage my MBP's lifetime? When I say on.. I mean connected to the adaptor and left on and not going to sleep..

I've to say.. I did the same thing to my old Laptop which was a Fujitsu and after 2 years my motherboard burned out!!

If such a thing happens to my MBP will the Applecare guarantee cover it? Of course I'd have to extend it to 3 years.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Sure... It'll be fine! I been leaving mine on for several months at a time, restarting only when Apple bring out patches. Eighteen months later it's still running fine!!!
 
My uptime record for my iBook G4 was 31 days, rebooted after an update. Should be fine to keep it running, just sleep it when you're on the move.

There are Mac users here with machines running as server with uptimes of hundreds of days, sometimes a few years or more.
 
Mine is on all the time too, I only restart for updates which require restarts or the occasional Mac PMS (which is very seldom anyway). I'm currently on 5 days uptime. Its been like this for about 2 years already but the only problem is that my battery's are dead because I didn't get to use them much. Oh well, paying for a new battery is much less than a whole new motherboard I guess :p
 
map1978 said:
Mine stays on always (put it to sleep at night).

Only time I shut down is when I take it to travel. I do restarts every week to maximize my ram.
Click to expand...

Completely unnecessary qnd actually wrong. OSX will store stuff in the RAM for faster access, actually speeding up your computer. What you do with restarts i slow down the computer. The memory used by OSX is actually available when not necessary, so your memory is actually not full.

By the way, I only turn off my computer when I get on a plane. Last time it was mid-November.
 
Not sure what happened with your Fujitsu, but keep in mind that the major components in modern day home computers are designed with a 10 year life in mind. This is also why the "turning your computer off reduces lifetime" myth is bunk. Unless you expect to hold onto and regularly use your machine in its current configuration for more than 10 years, you're gonna be fine.

With the exception of restarts due to updates/installs and shut downs if I'm not gonna be using my MBP for an extended period (24+ hours), it's never off. Actually, since I usually have it doing something at all times, it's also rarely in sleep. It's still running, just in display off mode.
 
Macmel said:
Completely unnecessary qnd actually wrong. OSX will store stuff in the RAM for faster access, actually speeding up your computer. What you do with restarts i slow down the computer. The memory used by OSX is actually available when not necessary, so your memory is actually not full.

By the way, I only turn off my computer when I get on a plane. Last time it was mid-November.
Click to expand...

It does not matter what OS you have, it depends on the usage of the computer. For many people, they use multiple applications at same time and play with different apps every day resulting into potential memory leaks that can't be rescued by simply quitting the apps. Also many apps may appear to be "quit" when in actual the GUI was terminated without killing the hung processes. Many OS X users does not ever see terminal and doesn't work with it to know how to use kill command. So many of the times, the memory leaks are the cause of slowdown and can many time only be rescued by restarting the machine.
 
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