Topic: Should I turn my laptop off?

[cedric86]

I usually leave my laptop on all the time. If I'm leaving town for a couple days or for some other reason know that I won't be using it for more than 24 hours, I will shut it down and unplug it. Even though I don't do this, I have this vague notion that it's a good idea to turn off or at least restart one's computer on a regular basis. Is there any benefit to this? Is there any harm to leaving it turned on (but "asleep" with the monitor folded down) for hours or days at a time? For what it's worth, I use a MacBook running OS 10.5.8.

[Citizen Skeptic]

I leave mine on all the time but the power management system shuts down most of it when not in use - the screen, the network, the hard disk, etc... My hard drive is an SSD.

[AQB24712]

I do the same thing with my MacBook, cedric.  I don't think it has a very impressive battery life (it went from 100% to something like 70% in the 90 minutes or so I was at the laundromat yesterday), but I don't know that this has anything to do with our habit.

[Ajzzz]

If it's in sleep mode/hibernation, then there's no large downsides, you probably will never notice the difference since there's little difference between "sleep" and "off". Charging the Lithium-ion battery as much as possible seems to be best practice.

[Shadow Of A Doubt]

I find that if I don't shut my computer down regularly it slows right down to a crawl. This is my anecdote which is mine and belongs to me.

[Citizen Skeptic]

If it's in sleep mode/hibernation, then there's no large downsides, you probably will never notice the difference since there's little difference between "sleep" and "off". Charging the Lithium-ion battery as much as possible seems to be best practice.

My notebook recommends that if you mostly keep the computer plugged in, that you should limit charging the battery to 85% for maximum battery life.

[Ajzzz]

If it's in sleep mode/hibernation, then there's no large downsides, you probably will never notice the difference since there's little difference between "sleep" and "off". Charging the Lithium-ion battery as much as possible seems to be best practice.

My notebook recommends that if you mostly keep the computer plugged in, that you should limit charging the battery to 85% for maximum battery life.

I'm not sure about that, they can't be overcharged, I don't know why that would be and haven't seen that before. I meant time spent charging/charged not how much the battery is charged.

I find that if I don't shut my computer down regularly it slows right down to a crawl. This is my anecdote which is mine and belongs to me.

I've run Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu for well over a month and never had this problem. It's got to be a software problem, and my guess would be a memory leak causing something to use all your RAM or a piece of software that silently crashes using up cycles in the background.

[Citizen Skeptic]

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/75684/

Well, as some of you might know I've been suffering from a few dead notebook batteries after about a year of use due to them being plugged in to the A/C all the time and being trickle charged.

I've bought a new Sony Vaio notebook (FW series) a few months ago that has a very nifty solution, a battery care function, that allows you to set a charge level on the battery so it will never try to top off a already fully charged pack (one of the reasons I bought this notebook). Kudos to Sony for offering this manual control, as it saves us from more chemical waste and having to replace batteries that should've lasted a whole lot longer.

Another poster disputes it. It makes sense that you don't want to stress the battery if you don't have to.

[Ajzzz]

It's not stressing the battery and they don't over charge, I don't think that person knows what they're talking about. It is true, as referred to in the thread, you don't want to store the battery from a 100% charged state, because when it's not charging and also not being used, it's still using the power to maintain itself. Best practice for lithium-ion batteries is to keep them 100% charged. Best practice for nickel–cadmium batteries is to let them run completely down once and a while, otherwise they lose their capacity.

[Desert Fox]

I used to all the battery to fully discharge and then recharge but found that it probably does more damage than just keep it charged

[cedric86]

My MacBook is almost always plugged in. Sometimes I unplug it when I want to move around without moving the cord, but it's usually plugged in.

[SQ the ΣΛ/IGMд]

It's good to reboot any computer once in a while.
It resets the RAM and hard drive - starts them fresh.

[Ajzzz]

It's good to reboot any computer once in a while.
It resets the RAM and hard drive - starts them fresh.

Unless there's particular issues with buggy software the only reason most people need to reboot are updates.

[Desert Fox]

back in the bad old days of 95 / 98 / ME, you had to reset periodically but not so much with XP and understand the same with later OS as well

[Green Ideas]

BSOD... oh, the humanity!