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Put it to sleep or shut it down at night?

O

orangeillini14

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 1, 2008
153
3
I use my MacBook Pro probably 5+ hours every day and I was wondering what would be better to do at night when I'm not using it. Shut it down or put it to sleep? Does it make a difference?

When I say overnight I mean like... 10 hours or so.
 
Hmm.. My MBP has been on for about three week now! I never shut it down other then for a restart due to updates, or the rare panic. In my opinion there's no need to ever shut down a Mac. For one thing, the OS will automatically do it's nightly crons, index it's HD (if not already).

So far everything is happy as Larry.

If your worried about buring out the TFT,
you can put the display to sleep via pressing Control + Shift + Eject (sleeps the display, not the machine) alternative setup the energy control panel to time out, goto screen saver.. blah!
Perhaps, time it out so it'll sleep the machine after 2-3 hours?
 
I put my MBP to sleep if I'm leaving my desk or apartment and not taking it with me. If I'm carting it around, I always shut it off. A habit I developed when I saw several people who carted around their powerbooks in sleep mode experience hard drive failure.
 
Ok. I can already detect a hint of misinformation. When in 'Sleep Mode' the data is stored in RAM so there is 0 correlation to the hard drive failure.

Additionally, Apple has a daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance script that run in the wee hours of the morning (this can be rescheduled). If your laptop is OFF then the scripts will NOT run until next day, week, month.
 
ntrigue said:
Ok. I can already detect a hint of misinformation. When in 'Sleep Mode' the data is stored in RAM so there is 0 correlation to the hard drive failure.

Additionally, Apple has a daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance script that runs in the wee hours of the morning (this can be rescheduled). If your laptop is OFF then the scripts will NOT run until next day, week, month.
Click to expand...

It wasn't that they lost data, it's just that the hard drive is a moving part, and in the old powerbooks, the heads on the HD didn't park when it was carried around - there were no motion sensors like on the MBP. So their HD's physically failed because of being bumped around because they were still active.

I realize this probably isn't an issue for the MBPs :)
 
Set fans to 2000rpm, close everything except transmission, turn off backlight and leave on over night, as most Peers are in the US, and have good connections. Did 5Gb in one night :cool:

Will be doing again tonight, and at 2000rpm, you cant even hear it. :apple:
 
MattZani said:
Set fans to 2000rpm, close everything except transmission, turn off backlight and leave on over night, as most Peers are in the US, and have good connections. Did 5Gb in one night :cool:

Will be doing again tonight, and at 2000rpm, you cant even hear it. :apple:
Click to expand...

Hmm... 2000rpm fans, in 33°C heat!
If I did that, I'll be asking my MBP for a early death! :mad:

Wait till you get 120Mb/s (synchronous) fibre in the UK!
Jee... Hate to think what kind of bandwidth caps they'll impose - here.. there are non! :)
 
lavrishevo said:
These scripts will not run while asleep right?
Click to expand...

Yes they will run when in 'Sleep Mode'* in the sense that your screen is black and no fans are running.

*In Energy Saver there is an option to 'Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible' if this is checked then the scripts would NOT run. You can always use ONYX/Cocktail to 'catch-up' on maintenance's anyway.
 
ntrigue said:
Ok. I can already detect a hint of misinformation. When in 'Sleep Mode' the data is stored in RAM so there is 0 correlation to the hard drive failure.

Additionally, Apple has a daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance script that run in the wee hours of the morning (this can be rescheduled). If your laptop is OFF then the scripts will NOT run until next day, week, month.
Click to expand...

Speaking of misinformation :p, this hasn't been the case for a few years now. OS X once used cron to manage these jobs and cron would not run jobs missed due to sleep or shutdown. Since launchd was introduced in 10.4 (? maybe 10.3, but I don't think so) this is no longer the case. If a job is missed in Leopard because the computer is off or sleeping, the job will run immediately after the computer boots or is awakes from sleep. It took longer to run in Tiger, and there is a weird sequence of events that can cause a job to be missed, but they generally still ran.
 
I usually shut mine down, but that's only because I get the strange striping issue in Safari after I've slept it on occasion. Just easier to avoid the problem by shutting it down.
 
i put mine to sleep all the time, for about a year
its great, my battery now lasts for 30 minutes.. :D
 
lavrishevo said:
These scripts will not run while asleep right?
Click to expand...

in Leopard the scripts run after youve woken.

i always just sleep my MBP, never shut it down. while asleep only the RAM is powered but if your worried about the electricity use you could also hibernate your MacBook by pulling out the battery while its asleep, use this hint (involes Unix commands) or download a hibernation Widget.
 
SchneiderMan said:
i put mine to sleep all the time, for about a year
its great, my battery now lasts for 30 minutes.. :D
Click to expand...

Yeah, not sure if its caused by that but I also frequently put my old MBP on sleep mode and now the battery life is pathetic.
 
Balty said:
has anyone heard of a waste of electricity
Click to expand...

I am proud to say my iMac, WiFi Router, External Hard-Drive and Printer all get switched off at the plug every night. I'm not so good with my PB, however, especially given the time it takes to boot.
 
Dmac77 said:
No offense meant, but the little power that the RAM requires isn't going to affect Green House Gasses or your electricity bill. And I agree go hug a tree.

Don
Click to expand...

Just as a topic of interest but are you always so ANTI EARTH!

I mean, the MR staff had to clean a whole thread of your comments!:apple:
 
Not going to sink to your trolling level by starting another debate that I will eventually lose because of the clear political bias on this forum. That is all I have to say.

Don
 
Balty said:
has anyone heard of a waste of electricity
Click to expand...

While a computer is sleeping, it uses about that same amount of power as a wrist watch. Plus, your computer uses a surge of power during boot so shutting it down and starting it up could potentially use more electricity than allowing it to sleep.
 
I've recently started putting mine to Sleep instead of a full shutdown. It seems to work fine most of the time, but today I had some network lag/flakiness (lost my ssh connection) after waking it up this morning. I did a reboot, and it's all working fine now. I may just go back to a full shutdown. I'm not really waiting on it to boot since I turn it on before I go do something else before I'm ready to sit down and compute.
 
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