Options
Sleep or off: which better?
guypd
Posts: 2,643
Forum Member
✭✭✭
My Lenovo PC is totally silent when it goes into sleep mode. Only sign of life is the flashing green on/off light. It led me to wonder: is sleeping the computer as good as, or better than, switching off? There's no reboot required, and it doesn't seem to use any energy at all.
Thoughts / facts I'm missing?
Thoughts / facts I'm missing?
0
Comments
I tend to sleep it when leaving it during the day and power off at night. No idea which is best for the PC as there is little consensus on the net...
My laptop is a different thing, I normally put that in hibernate mode, because that don't use any power and still boot up pretty quick. but my Laptop uses Mint linux, also the battery is no good.
Longevity of hard drive and such like. The general life / health of the computer.
LOL, I have this image now of someone bringing their computer out of hibernation in the morning just to sleep it for the day!
They certainly used to say that drives lasted longer if they were kept going continuously but I'm not sure that is the case today.
Anyway, sleep mode should power off the disk after a set time.
I use the sleep function plus hibernate on my laptop which is Windows 7. My desktop PC has Windows 8 (unfortunately) so I shut it down fully - one of the few advantages of W8 is the quick start time.
30w powered normal use
10-11 w sleep
10w hibernate
Gets up to 49w when coming out of sleep/hibernate to normal use.
It can't use 10W in sleep or Hibernate.
Hibernate mode is completely turned off and so uses 0 watts.
I use sleep mode on my laptop. Boots up in seconds.
Same here, except I tend to be lazy and turn off the power at night when in sleep mode (Windows 7). It throws up the warning screen on reboot the next morning but doesn't seem to do any harm.
I never turn my Macs off. Sometimes I shut the lid on my macbook to make it easier to carry (which puts it to sleep) and my iMac has been on since I bough it a few years ago.
When the laptop is hibernating and not plugged in, it still uses power, since one of the lights is on.
It can take a few minutes for it to go into hibernate mode. All the lights should go off eventually.
It is storing an image of the memory on the hard drive and then shuts off totally. If yours doesn't do that then something is wrong and it is sleeping instead.
I will test again and leave it a bit longer for a reading.
Now it's off at night, off during the day until I need it then suspend/sleep until it's time to go to bed. I tend not to leave it on when I go out either in case of fire.
The laptop is different though, I leave it sleeping all the time because it takes a while to boot. Very, very occasionally I shut it down properly but it's rare.
There should be no lights on when it's hibernating. You can take the battery out of a hibernated laptop and it'll still be hibernating, everything is stored in the RAM. If there are lights on its in sleep, not hibernate.
it is. It's stored in disk.