To Sleep, Or Not To Sleep, That Is The Question

[ehlfg]

Sounds like I am unusual, in that I usually shut down (originally MBP, now MBA) when I move from place to place. Part of the reason is habit and the other part is that I often have USB devices plugged in (Time Machine drive at my desk, USB mouse dongle, 3G wireless modem on the road).

A couple of reasons why the USB devices encourage me to shut down:

• Shutting down will disconnect the USB drives gracefully. When I sleep and disconnect, I get warning messages that I should eject the drives first. Sometimes I have to repair the disks. Yes, I could eject first before sleeping. But I often forget when I just sleep by closing the lid and then pull the cables.
• I seem to repeatedly get hit with a bug when resuming from sleep, where the cursor tracks but the system is otherwise non-responsive. The only recourse is to hard-power-off the machine. Various forum posts seem to indicate that this might be related to having USB devices plugged in. Shutting down avoids this bug entirely.

 

[razor-sex]

I would sleep easy

 

[SkyBell]

Meh, I do both. Sometimes I just sleep, sometimes shut down. No reason or rhyme why I do one or the other, it doesn't really make a difference to me. I don't think either one really has benefits over the other that aren't countered by cons.

 

[adamk77]

 

 

[theJamie]

I shut down for the night because I won't use my mac till a good 16 hours later. I don't see the point for it to sleep. Also, my mac boots up quickly anyway. But it is approx. a week old and I am use to a clogged 2005 Windows XP which takes like 2-5 minutes to load.
I DO sleep when I won't use my PC for 30 minutes or more. Basically I sleep throughout the day and shut down for the night. Everything seems to be working fine for me.
Maybe this sleep deal is just personal preference.

 

[vant]

I shut it down at night and put it to sleep during the day. I just don't see the point in not shutting it down at night, it literally takes 3 seconds to shut it down.

 

[adamfishercox]

But considerably more time to boot up and restore all your programs and windows.

 

[theJamie]

Some people call tomatoes a vegetable and some call it a fruit. (Though it really is a fruit). I think what it comes down to is personal preference. And if it takes an inordinate amount of time to boot up, then maybe something is wrong. As technology progresses, people seem to lose the virtue of patience. Sleep if you want to sleep and shut it down if you want to shut it down.

 

[macbook yes]

I sleep it everytime I'm not using it by closing the lid, unless I want to stay connected to iChat. I restart it every 2 or 3 weeks or so just because. I don't know, after a while I just feel like I should. I'm currently at 17 days of uptime. I don't usually turn it off for the night, just a quick restart occasionally. I use it in classes everyday so that usually runs the battery down to 40% or so. I get good battery life in class, but thats probably because I turn off the wireless so all I'm doing is taking notes. I'd guess I could last 5 or almost 6 hours with only word open and brightness at 1. Then I charge it at night. I'm not really worried about hurting my battery. It's a laptop, not a baby. I don't change its diaper every 4 hours either.

 

[applebook]

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is typically a driver problem. Sleep works perfectly in Windows 7. On XP it usually works like **** but what can you expect from an OS that is 8 years old?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the hybrid sleep mode used in OSX (and Win7) turns off everything but the RAM when going to sleep. I don't see how that would be a big power drain or would cause problems.

XP SP3 hibernate works for me.

Some people call tomatoes a vegetable and some call it a fruit. (Though it really is a fruit). I think what it comes down to is personal preference. And if it takes an inordinate amount of time to boot up, then maybe something is wrong. As technology progresses, people seem to lose the virtue of patience. Sleep if you want to sleep and shut it down if you want to shut it down.

I agree. I don't believe that it matters much whether you shut-down or sleep. DO whatever works for you.

 

[sammich]

More battery cycles are actually better for your battery health. Apple even recommends more cycles.

Recommends cycles? Wuh?

What I think geofreak meant to say is: if you don't use the battery much (ie plugged in at desk all the time), Apple recommends you to take it out once a month to drain it fully.

 

[brotherandy]

Seems like this question has generated a lot of responses. Maybe that's because there is no definitive answer - everyone has their own preferences, and the effect on the hardware side of things seems to be minimal. I agree that the canned response from Apple Support - which was patronizing to say the least - may not cover it all. However, I think that shutting down your Macbook at the very least 1.) does not have that many negative effects, 2.) may slightly extend battery life and the life expectancy of the power adapter (although others have disagreed with me on this last point), and 3.) "cleans" the system on a regular basis, if you have a lot of applications or processes running (which I personally don't).

BUT WHY CAN'T APPLE GIVE US SOME DECENT ADVICE ON THIS? Just a line or two extra in the Macbook manual would help, and would settle this issue once and for all.

On other matters, I agree that sleep on a Windows machine is not perfect, but the hibernate feature, which the Mac OS does not offer, works very well, although corruptions do occur over time.

Peace