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Poll: Who puts their iMac to sleep or shuts it down?

Do you put your Mac to sleep or shut it down?

  • Put to sleep.

    Votes: 168 72.7%

  • Shut down.

    Votes: 63 27.3%
  • Total voters
    231
With an iMac and Fusion I turn off. Its so fast just as well. Its always better to turn off for piece of mind. However without fudion i would sleep an iMac

When I had my 2009 MacBook Pro I used to sleep it by closing it. Then one day I noticed it was red hot. Opened it up and it had come on while in my bag causing it to get red hot and flatten the battery. Since then I always turned my laptop off.
 
I sleep my macbook air. I would do the same for my imac as well, but my dad is very particular about this and insists on shutting it down before retiring for the night. :p
 
I used to have a 2007 20 inch iMac that was always on. The longest up-time was just over 300 days - between OS X upgrades I think (it would go to sleep itself when not in use).

I gave it to my uncle when I got a 2011 21.5 to replace it. He still uses it everyday. It's never missed a beat.
 
Sleep becuase it annoys me with how long the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse take to pair with the iMac everytime I switch the damn thing on!
 
jamesjingyi said:
Is there anything bad that can happen if you sleep too much?
Click to expand...

Potentially excessive spin ups and spin downs if your Mac has a hard drive in it. If it has solid state, then on, off, sleep - whatever, it will make little difference.

If my iMac had only SSD, I would probably still leave it on always, but sleep would be more of an option.

My MacBook Air sleeps whenever its not in use. Then again it sees less use than my iMac.
 
I shut my baby down at night no need for it to be sleeping since I have ssd and it boots in like 10 seconds
 
Johnf1285 said:
Potentially excessive spin ups and spin downs if your Mac has a hard drive in it. If it has solid state, then on, off, sleep - whatever, it will make little difference.

If my iMac had only SSD, I would probably still leave it on always, but sleep would be more of an option.

My MacBook Air sleeps whenever its not in use. Then again it sees less use than my iMac.
Click to expand...

So if I leave my MacBook Air on sleep it will be fine? (P.s sorry for such a nooby question haha :) )
 
Johnf1285 said:
I've been leaving mine on all the time recently.

I use Hot Corners to sleep the display, otherwise it is set to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. The hard disks are set to never spin down (a good way to avoid unnecessary spin ups and spin downs).

According to my UPS, the iMac consumes 5 to 7 watts when the display is off and it is idle. Less than most light bulbs.
Click to expand...

How do I set my hard drive to never spin down?
 
rushbc said:
How do I set my hard drive to never spin down?
Click to expand...

System Preference --> Energy Saver, then make sure this box is not checked:
 

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I turn mine off completely, because it wakes up on its own after a little while (say, half an hour or something usually), which is really annoying at night because the screen's so bright.
 
aggri1 said:
I turn mine off completely, because it wakes up on its own after a little while (say, half an hour or something usually), which is really annoying at night because the screen's so bright.
Click to expand...

See my post #44, above, and make sure "Wake for Network Access" is not checked.
 
talmy said:
See my post #44, above, and make sure "Wake for Network Access" is not checked.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I'll check that, but it happens in Windows 7 mostly (I think; I can't remember whether it wakes in OS X also, I'm mostly using Windows these days). I don't know where the equivalent of that setting would be in Windows.
 
talmy said:
See my post #44, above, and make sure "Wake for Network Access" is not checked.
Click to expand...

Thanks so much to all the Apple brothers and sisters who responded to this topic.

And a special thank-you to Talmy, who just gave me the best tidbit of info I have yet to receive from these extremely helpful forums

I had stopped sleeping my my iMac and began shutting it down because every night it would wake up in the middle of the night and turn on the display for no apparent reason…and even tho I would set the brightness to the lowest level, it would still wake me up most nights. Now I know why it was waking up!

I have disabled the "Wake for network access" option, and now I can simply put the iMac to sleep at night again when I go to bed.

Thanks again!
 
Last edited:
I shut it down because of Windows trauma's. On Windows it never worked like it should.

I have my first Mac a few months now. I never tried sleep mode, because it turns on and off like it should without force quitting some background services or program lie in Windows...
 
Shut down and booting is excruciatingly slow on my 09' iMac so I much prefer sleep/wake cycles especially since I use my system on and off all day for mostly short spurts at a time. I just shut it down when going out of town for a few days.
 
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