I have a friend who has a 2010 mac pro laptop and she in 4 years has never shut down the thing (unless needed in an upgrade) or restarted. She just puts it to sleep by closing the lid. Now a lot of people have told her and she insists it's fine to operate her mac in this way.. I'm not really arguing with that necessarily as I don't know enough about it but I assume there must be some sort of cache pile up over time with installs and whatever else that need a restart at least now and then. Am I correct in that assumption? Is it wise to never shut down your mac? Can it actually harm it by just putting it to sleep when not in use for years at a stretch?
Anyway I mainly ask because she has had very slow operation in Maveriks recently with that machine and many beach balls popping up when doing very simple tasks. The whole thing ran like a slug. I then repaired permissions for her, reset VRAM (obviously restarting during this process) and it seems to be running ridiculously faster now. I'm just wondering what actually fixed the problem or caused it. Was it that she was not shutting the thing down or did it fix just because it needed a PRAM reset? .. It's still kinda slow and I notice icons take a while to show up in the finder but overall vastly better than what it was. Any insight would be of interest to me. Cheers.
Anyway I mainly ask because she has had very slow operation in Maveriks recently with that machine and many beach balls popping up when doing very simple tasks. The whole thing ran like a slug. I then repaired permissions for her, reset VRAM (obviously restarting during this process) and it seems to be running ridiculously faster now. I'm just wondering what actually fixed the problem or caused it. Was it that she was not shutting the thing down or did it fix just because it needed a PRAM reset? .. It's still kinda slow and I notice icons take a while to show up in the finder but overall vastly better than what it was. Any insight would be of interest to me. Cheers.