quick and easy question about laptops (leave on or off)

carbed87 · Dec 22, 2006

ever since i recieved my laptop, i've always been completely shutting it down whenever im done with it, wether it be to watch tv, or to crash at a friends house, it always gets completely and properly shut down. my question is, is it better to just leave it on and have it go into sleep mode when im not using it and just shut it off at the end of the night, or should i keep doing what im doing, everytime im done with it, completely turn it off. just thought i'd ask seeing as how is for the good of my computor.

Strype · Dec 22, 2006

Oh man did you open a can of worms

Last time the thread went a whole lot of pages.

Shut it off. The only killer of hardware is heat and it's that basic

Turkey Sammich · Dec 22, 2006

imo keep it off when its not in use. Heat and lag is hell is left on for long ammounts of time. Lag + **** = Bad.

90 · Dec 22, 2006

i always shut p/c's down.. even its only to take a crap and turn it back on.. those craps can take 30 min at times..

Daggar · Dec 22, 2006

90mustang_GT5.0 said:
i always shut p/c's down.. even its only to take a crap and turn it back on.. those craps can take 30 min at times..

This is wrong.

Desktops take more abuse from being shut down and restarted than they do from being left running. The only thing on desktops these days that take abuse from being left on are the cooling fans. Those are cheap and easily replaceable. Hard-drives also have moving parts and are subject to failure but MTBF (mean time between failures) is in at LEAST the 200,000 hour mark even for older sub-10 Gig drives. Heat is not an issue so long is proper cooling and monitoring is maintained. Most motherboards will shutdown the system if failure of the CPU fan is detected.

Laptops are a slightly different animal. Moving parts can be difficult and expensive to obtain and also difficult to replace. Laptops should be shut down when not in use to prevent dust, dirt, and final failure of internal fans. Many manufacturers also have a tendancy to use an inferior thermal compounds between the CPUs, memory, chipsets and their respective heat sinks. These compounds can become hard and loose their thermal conductivity over time. One more reason to shut them down to prolong the "baking" of these thermal compounds.

For desktops... Arctic Silver is about the best thermal compound on the market. I've never seen it bake.

bullitt 5561 · Dec 22, 2006

i just shut the case of my notebook and it goes to sleep and is cool to the touch when it sits a while. No problems yet. base laptops are like $400 bucks now too.

90 · Dec 22, 2006

how is it wrong ? ive owned a laptop i was talken about my Desk top..

carbed87 · Dec 22, 2006

ok, because i didn't know if it was more work for the laptop to be shutting down and booting up 4 times a day then to just flip the screen down and make it sleep. i dont really mind shutting it down because it only takes like 30 seconds to do so (and boot back up)

Daggar · Dec 22, 2006

It's good to shut laptops down if they're going to not be used for a time (couple hours or more). Sleep mode is usually pretty good. It stops all the moving parts. stores your current processes on the drive in a temp file, then goes to a very low current draw.

It's the constant, shut down and restart etc. that causes the most wear and tear. That includes sleep mode as well. You're still spinning everything down and then back up again. It's just not necessary for periods of non-use of less than an hour. Not even on a laptop. Contantly shutting them down and restarting jsut causes more wear and tear.

fox-gt · Dec 23, 2006

I hibernate my laptop. This way it doesn't use battery but loads much faster than a complete boot. If mine is going to be off for a long period of time I shutdown.

286 rocks · Dec 23, 2006

lol, mines been on 24/7 for almost a yr and a 1/2 now. The only down time it gets is a restart

iwashmycar · Dec 23, 2006

ya mines been on for a few years now.....i just turn it off to take it places, where itll be turned right back on again

fivespeedsteed · Dec 23, 2006

my dad bitches about "my computer making the electric bill high" i guess my 430 watt thermaltake sucks power? no, my dads just wierd...if i could id leave my desktop on 24/7 amd i have done this plenty, i have vantec stealths everywhere so its not loud. my notebook i used to leave on all the time sometimes, usually though i just standby it.

smokin91' · Dec 24, 2006

My computer has been on for the last 4 years, besides power outages and for reboots.

Snikt89GT · Dec 24, 2006

Daggar said:
It's good to shut laptops down if they're going to not be used for a time (couple hours or more). Sleep mode is usually pretty good. It stops all the moving parts. stores your current processes on the drive in a temp file, then goes to a very low current draw.

It's the constant, shut down and restart etc. that causes the most wear and tear. That includes sleep mode as well. You're still spinning everything down and then back up again. It's just not necessary for periods of non-use of less than an hour. Not even on a laptop. Contantly shutting them down and restarting jsut causes more wear and tear.

Why would starting up and shutting a computer down cause more wear and tear?

Daggar · Dec 24, 2006

Snikt89GT said:
Why would starting up and shutting a computer down cause more wear and tear?

Hard drives (for instance) are hermetically sealed. Regardless, the platters spin anywhere from 7000 to 10,000 rpm and sometimes faster. Between the platters are stylus' that are operated by a step motor. Each time the step motor moves, it's a duty cycle. When you boot, those step motors go through several thousand duty cycles then move back to the home position vs. leaving the machine running running and the stylus going through a few dozen cycles to get what it's looking for then returning to home.

On the IC side, you have the heat cycles that all electronics go through. Maintaining a fairly constant temperature and heat soak keeps everything heated evenly where constantly shutting down and reheating causes things to expand and contract (often unevenly until heat soak is reached). The changes can cause premature failure of components. Granted, these things are designed with these things in mind but it still serves to shorten the life span over time.

For a desktop cycling all the moving parts through cold start to hot start etc. causes them more wear then spinning at a constant speed. Shutting down machines for short periods of non-use is a "left-over" from the old days when large transistors and voltage regulators were used (they didn't dissipate heat well at all). Those kinds of components are not used anymore. Even voltage regulators are solid state now.

Snikt89GT · Dec 24, 2006

Daggar said:
Hard drives (for instance) are hermetically sealed. Regardless, the platters spin anywhere from 7000 to 10,000 rpm and sometimes faster. Between the platters are stylus' that are operated by a step motor. Each time the step motor moves, it's a duty cycle. When you boot, those step motors go through several thousand duty cycles then move back to the home position vs. leaving the machine running running and the stylus going through a few dozen cycles to get what it's looking for then returning to home.

On the IC side, you have the heat cycles that all electronics go through. Maintaining a fairly constant temperature and heat soak keeps everything heated evenly where constantly shutting down and reheating causes things to expand and contract (often unevenly until heat soak is reached). The changes can cause premature failure of components. Granted, these things are designed with these things in mind but it still serves to shorten the life span over time.

For a desktop cycling all the moving parts through cold start to hot start etc. causes them more wear then spinning at a constant speed. Shutting down machines for short periods of non-use is a "left-over" from the old days when large transistors and voltage regulators were used (they didn't dissipate heat well at all). Those kinds of components are not used anymore. Even voltage regulators are solid state now.

All of that makes sense but has there ever been any actual data or studies on it?

We have about 700 desktops/laptops at work which get power cycled all the time. I'm responsible for the data center where we have about 400 or so 15,000RPM fibre/scsi drives and they fail far more often than the desktop HDDs.

At idle these days desktops are doing far more than they used to, so the drives aren't just sitting idle. Indexing, virus scans, spyware, defragment, etc..

quick and easy question about laptops (leave on or off)

carbed87

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Strype

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Turkey Sammich

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90

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90

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286 rocks

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