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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
In my case I've got a separate Mac mini server thats on 24/7 (consumes 41 watts even with 8TB of drives) so sleeping the other systems, with wake on LAN off, is not an issue. In fact, wake on LAN is a problem because of the proxy action of the Airport Extreme causes the waking system to see another of the same name and then rename itself. It's been a bug ever since that feature was added to OS X.

Yes, I thought of getting a Mini for homesharing. Probably the ultimate solution :)
 
Sleep, I reboot maybe once a month, or if something is acting up. Hot corner in the upper left, I just throw the pointer up there when I leave my desk.
 
Hot corner in the upper left, I just throw the pointer up there when I leave my desk.

Is that to make it sleep?

I have a hot corner in the lower left to put the display to sleep, and after 45 minutes the whole computer automatically sleeps. Every time I leave the desk, I put the cursor in that hot corner.
 
Is that to make it sleep?

I have a hot corner in the lower left to put the display to sleep, and after 45 minutes the whole computer automatically sleeps. Every time I leave the desk, I put the cursor in that hot corner.

Yep, I think mine sleeps the computer at 15 min.
 
Standby power consumption represents between 9% to 16% of the average power bill, according to a recent study. That can be as much as £86 ($132) per year.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/26/appliances-standby-cost-households-energy
Yes, that's the whole house, and the Mini is just a part of that. But if you get into the habit of leaving your Mac on -- what about the monitors, printers, scanners, external drives, hardware interfaces, audio equipment, etc, etc that's all attached? The easiest thing to do is turn off the Mac, and turn of the power strip that's got everything else on it.

Your setup is unusual. Most people, including me, only have the iMac. I don't have external drives, scanners, audio equipment, etc. I'm not in a band. So to turn off the iMac saves nothing over sleeping. I'm just relating it to normal users, not movie producers.
 
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