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New Mac mini with some questions

L

Losium

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 21, 2005
22
0
Orlando,FL
Hey all,

I just made the switch yesterday after my Pc notebook's harddrive failed on me.

I have a few questions though, the booklet reccomends that I only turn off the computer if I plan on not using it for a few days...Is it really a good idea to just leave it on all the time, allowing it to sleep while I'm not using it? (I moved the sleep timer to 35 minutes or so)

Also the new Mac minis are apparently not in the Apple stores, I ended up with the regular 1.25 Ghz mini. Either way though, I'm really enjoying it so far!

It feels like I'm rambling now, but I have a comment about the slot loading disc drive. When I was reading other posts about how it scared people the first time they used it, I kept thinking, how the heck would it scare them? Course when I was inserting a disc I was slowly pushing it in, thinking to myself, is it broken? And then it grabbed the thing so fast! Oy, kinda jumped..:p
 
Welcome to Macs. :)

It's absolutely fine to leave a Mac sleeping rather than shutting it down. Pretty much the only difference between sleeping and shutting down is the fact that the former still gives power to the RAM enabling the OS to start immediately (because it's kinda still technically running). Did that make sense? Probably not, but the long and the short of it is that you don't really ever need to shut it down.
 
Another ditto that sleep is very, very reliable. Since the hard drive spins down, it will not really contribute to reducing hard drive lifetime, which I imagine might be a concern considering how you came to upgrade. :(

If you do all the upgrades as they're released, you will end up rebooting it every 2-4 weeks anyways, because of upgrades to Quicktime or Bluetooth or other OS X upgrades that require a reboot. So that should be plenty of rebooting.

Hope you enjoy your computer! :) And welcome to the family! :D
 
Losium said:
I have a few questions though, the booklet reccomends that I only turn off the computer if I plan on not using it for a few days...Is it really a good idea to just leave it on all the time, allowing it to sleep while I'm not using it? (I moved the sleep timer to 35 minutes or so)
Click to expand...

In terms of the hardware, all personal computers (Intels, Macs, etc) are better off being left turned on all the time. The reason is that electrical components such as the CPU and RAM will either fail very early in their life... hopefully during system burn-in, or at least in the first few months of use. Once you get past the infant mortality, failures are usually due to the thermal stresses encountered when they are powered up and have a sudden increase in temperature. Modern OS's will spin down drives when they are not in use so wearing out the mechanical HD is minimized if the machine is not in use.

In sleep mode, a Mac only maintains power to the RAM so there are no concerns about wearing out any mechanical devices.

On the software side, OS X is argued to be more stable with fewer memory leaks than Windows. In my experience I need to reboot my Windows laptop at least once a month. Whereas my OS X laptop I only reboot when software updates force me to reboot. Between the two, the OS X machine gets more use and runs a wider range of software than the Windows machine.
 
Also your mac runs a clean up session at night. With those clean ups it gets more stable. Unlike windoos, if you keep that running for a couple a days, some things get corrupted. I don't know how that is when it's sleeping though.
 
Losium said:
...It feels like I'm rambling now, but I have a comment about the slot loading disc drive. When I was reading other posts about how it scared people the first time they used it, I kept thinking, how the heck would it scare them? Course when I was inserting a disc I was slowly pushing it in, thinking to myself, is it broken? And then it grabbed the thing so fast! Oy, kinda jumped..:p
Click to expand...

I wasn't scared. I'm tough like that.:)
 
Dreadnought said:
Also your mac runs a clean up session at night. With those clean ups it gets more stable. Unlike windoos, if you keep that running for a couple a days, some things get corrupted. I don't know how that is when it's sleeping though.
Click to expand...

It will not run if the computer is sleeping, but supposedly Apple made changes to the way these scripts are activated, to address this issue, mid-cycle in Panther. If it bothers one greatly, one can get an application such as Onyx or MacJanitor to run the maintenance activities whenever one wants, or of course open terminal and run them using the "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" syntax.

I used MacJanitor and did other things to go out of my way to make sure I did this frequently in the past, and then at some point I gave it up, because it didn't seem worthwhile. But the log files are /var/log, and it appears that daily and weekly are getting done. It looks like monthly has not happened since August, though. :(
 
I understand your concern about sleep, Windows seems to have huge problems with it. I was used to my iMac G3 when I bought a Dell laptop, and I expected it to go to sleep and wake up the way it's supposed to. When I closed the lid, it did turn off, but it didn't always turn back on. Sometimes it would take a few seconds of poking at the keys before it turned on, sometimes I would have to turn the thing off improperly and reboot because the thing just wouldn't turn on. And when I did wake it back up from sleep it would "recover from a serious error" and wouldn't preserve what I was doing. I ended up shutting it down all the time and I avoided closing the lid.

Like others have sad, OS X does sleep a lot better. Stop working with it and it shuts down, move the mouse and it wakes up. It's just another reason why I love Mac.

As for the disc drive thing, the drive on my (very old) iMac freaked me out like crazy the first time I put a disc in there. You get used to it though.
 
Yeah, the disc thing scared the crap out of me when I first got my Powerbook, I had to shove it in there almost all the way for it to take. When my parents got their mini, I expected this behavior so it wasn't as much as a shock. I'm used to my car CD player that sucks in the disc once it's in about half way.
 
yg17 said:
Yeah, the disc thing scared the crap out of me when I first got my Powerbook, I had to shove it in there almost all the way for it to take. When my parents got their mini, I expected this behavior so it wasn't as much as a shock. I'm used to my car CD player that sucks in the disc once it's in about half way.
Click to expand...

Same here. At first I thought the drive might be faulty, so I decided to slowly push the disc in, leaving enough room to pull it back out if necessary. My car one grabs it after about 1/3 of it's in there - you have to keep your finger out of the centre hole while inserting it! :eek:

Dreadnought said:
Also nice when putting a mac to sleep, or closing the lid of a i/powerbook, it logs you automatically off when using MSN and Skype.
Click to expand...

And perhaps more importantly, logs you back on when you wake it back up :)
 
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