Sleep or Shut Down

alexx

alexx

alexx

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18 May 2006
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What are the pro's and con's, I've always been a shutdown man but am I missing the point? Feel like im missing out on something!

- Im on windows 7
 
The computer is still running when you put it to sleep, just in a low power state. When you hit the power button it will wake up in just a few seconds right where you left off.

Pro: Quicker to get back into Windows
Cons: Waste of energy if left sleeping for more than a short amount of time. If power goes off you lose any unsaved data.

The alternative to Sleep is Hibernate. Stores the contents of memory to the HDD and switches off completely. You still have to wait for Windows to boot, but all your programs etc will be the way you left them.
 
If I'm going away from my PC for more than several minutes, but I know I will return to it later in the day, I just put it into standby.

If I know I won't be returning to the PC that day, I just shut down.
 
My Desktop is placed in sleep mode any time I leave it for more than about half an hour, it also sleeps at night.

Laptop on the other hand always gets hibernated when not used.

I rarely actually shut down either and usually only for updates.
 
SiriusB said:
The computer is still running when you put it to sleep, just in a low power state. When you hit the power button it will wake up in just a few seconds right where you left off.

Pro: Quicker to get back into Windows
Cons: Waste of energy if left sleeping for more than a short amount of time. If power goes off you lose any unsaved data.

The alternative to Sleep is Hibernate. Stores the contents of memory to the HDD and switches off completely. You still have to wait for Windows to boot, but all your programs etc will be the way you left them.
Click to expand...

The other alternative is hybrid sleep which combines sleep and hibernate so in the event of power loss it can still recover the system state from the hibernate file.
 
Sleep mode.

Wakes up faster than a SSD can boot up.

Hey hang on. Doesn't that spoil the big point of having a SSD on a casual/gaming computer?

Well dang, already had those SSDs stuffed when it comes to storage.
 
Depends how you use your PC, personally I rarely ever shut down my laptop it's always going into sleep or hibernate as it's much faster to come back on. My desktop PC is left on 24/7, maybe I should start putting it to sleep on a night, probably burning through lots of money just leaving it running.
 
laptop, I use hibernate

pc, I use s3 sleep. I used my power meter before to test it and S3 used up only a tad more than 'off' state
 
The difference between s3 sleep and 'off' is about 2-5 watts.

@ 20 hours a day x 5 watts (generously), thats 36.5kW per year
~= £6 a year

... you are feeling sleepy, very SLEEPPY
 
Always sleep on my desktop. Sleep on my laptop unless it's gonna be away from mains for a while.

It's not so much the actual boot-up time that's annoying - it's having to load up your workspace again. When you're working on lots of documents in several apps it's so much easier just to sleep.
 
I put mine to sleep every night. Cruel yes. :p I do hate restarting my PC after Windows Updates etc, it takes so long compared to resuming from sleep. :D
 
my main pc i always shutdown
my laptop i shutdown if i'm not going to use it for a while but if i plan go back to it in a few mins then i just close the lid which puts it to sleep
 
I found out 2 things a few months ago

1 You wont loose where you were if power fails, cos win7/vista saves to the hdd aswell, so if you did have a power failure, no probs its just pulls the info back from the hdd. A bit like hibernate.(vista/win7 only supports this)

2 Shutdown and sleep uses roughly the same amount of power 0.2 - 0.3watts, cos I tested it with my plugin power meter;) So I never use shutdown cos whats the point.
 
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I always use Sleep. No real point doing a full shot-down on a PC these days, unless it's to install hardware or updates, there's simply no obvious benefit.
 
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