Shut down/hibernation/sleep mode?

[crabcakes]

This question is basically about what I should be doing with my laptop when not in use. I probably never go more than 20 hours without using it, so is there any benefit in shutting it down as opposed to putting it to sleep or hibernate?

[tokenuser]

All OS benefit from being shutdown. It clears memory, gives an opportunity for patches to install (on reboot).

Some apps don't recover from hibernate/sleep particularly well.

The startup/shutdown on Vista is an improvement over XP.

Apart from that it is really personal preference. Sleep/hibernate requires additional HDD space, but that about it.

To be honest, I always shutdown my XP laptop unless I am moving locations and I might only be down/offline for an hour or two, but often just close the lid on my Macbook and put it to sleep.

[tehboris]

Sleep is good for when you leave it for up to 30 minuets. It will turn on faster.

Hibernate completely turns the laptop off but keeps the contents of memory on the hard disk. The effect is like sleep mode, but with out using any power.

[burkhartmj]

In XP, standby is pretty great. Unless something is wrong, standby is fine [other than the fact that it does still use a small amount of power, so enough time in standby will kill the laptop.

On Vista, standby is a completely different story. Every now and then when I use standby on my Vista laptop, something freaks out upon bringing it back, and I have to restart to get back to normal functioning.

Hibernate is sketchy on every Windows OS I've ever encountered. Sometimes the Memory file getting saved to the hard drive gets messed up to or from the hard drive, and things don't work right until a full reboot. No clue what causes it, but I have always had 60/40 luck with hibernation [60% of the time it works]. The benefit is that it uses no power while in hibernation, the downside [once again in my own limited experience] is that it destroys battery while uploading the memory information back to the system memory, so I've always found it personally lighter on my battery when doing a cold boot.

[slynine]

All OS benefit from being shutdown. It clears memory, gives an opportunity for patches to install (on reboot).

Some apps don't recover from hibernate/sleep particularly well.

The startup/shutdown on Vista is an improvement over XP.

Apart from that it is really personal preference. Sleep/hibernate requires additional HDD space, but that about it.

To be honest, I always shutdown my XP laptop unless I am moving locations and I might only be down/offline for an hour or two, but often just close the lid on my Macbook and put it to sleep.

That pretty much sumed it up nicely.

[slynine]

In XP, standby is pretty great. Unless something is wrong, standby is fine [other than the fact that it does still use a small amount of power, so enough time in standby will kill the laptop.

On Vista, standby is a completely different story. Every now and then when I use standby on my Vista laptop, something freaks out upon bringing it back, and I have to restart to get back to normal functioning.

Hibernate is sketchy on every Windows OS I've ever encountered. Sometimes the Memory file getting saved to the hard drive gets messed up to or from the hard drive, and things don't work right until a full reboot. No clue what causes it, but I have always had 60/40 luck with hibernation [60% of the time it works]. The benefit is that it uses no power while in hibernation, the downside [once again in my own limited experience] is that it destroys battery while uploading the memory information back to the system memory, so I've always found it personally lighter on my battery when doing a cold boot.


Sounds like driver or bios issues, as much as I don't recommend bios upgrades if you are unsure about them, they can often cure sleep mode problems. But update your drivers first as they are the #1 cause of sleep mode problems.

I've never really had a problem with hibernation myself. Dont use it much, 4gigs is alot of space and takes to long from shutdown to startup to make it usefull. The more ram you have the longer it will take.

[burkhartmj]

Sounds like driver or bios issues, as much as I don't recommend bios upgrades if you are unsure about them, they can often cure sleep mode problems. But update your drivers first as they are the #1 cause of sleep mode problems.

I've never really had a problem with hibernation myself. Dont use it much, 4gigs is alot of space and takes to long from shutdown to startup to make it usefull. The more ram you have the longer it will take.

Usually it's Firefox that messes up. The interface [like the awesomebar, bookmarks bar, tabs bar etc.] go blank. If i pass my mouse over a section, that part goes back to normal, but eventually goes blank again. Another issue I experience is it turns back on, but the screen stays black, and it never finishes coming back fully.

Currently my BIOS is the most recent one available, and my drivers are all up-to-date as well. the video drivers are the only sketchy ones, but that's because nVidia in their infinite wisdom excludes laptop drivers from their unicode driver releases....even though the laptop cards use the same freaking drivers [the .ini that tells the installer what cards are supported doesn't include the laptop cards, though you can get a modded .ini file that works with them]. As far as the first issue, I'm pretty sure it's just Firefox and Vista not liking each other. And as to the second problem, I can't help if nVidia is horrible about laptop drivers [I'm an ATI fan anyway :p]

[excessiveidling]

I always viewed the whole shutting down vs hibernation like a car. Do you leave your car running if you're not using it? No you shut it down...if you're just stoppin in real quick to pick something up then you can leave it running. Same with computers...shut em down if you aint using em.

[ArmpitOfDeath]

I've had the opposite experience viz-a-viz Vista vs XP. Perhaps it's because I buy higher-end, pre-built machines from Tier 1 manufacturers be it desktop or laptop, but XP used to give me a fair number of issues in sleep or hibernation. Hibernation especially used to go wrong say about 1 in 8 times.

Since switching full-time to Vista however I have sleep and hibernation joy - on desktop and laptop. As burkhartmj says, there is the occasional hiccup with NVidia drivers - but when it happens, it seems to just be a case of going into the display cpanel, changing modes and changing back. On my Intel-IGP'd ultraportables (or in the case of the dual-graphics Sony's when in Intel mode) there seem to be no deal breakers at all.

I restart my laptops really once every Windows Update. That's about it. The rest of the time it's slept or hibernated. While clearing crud out is a factor, Vista is a modern OS and it can stay up for a long time without issues.

I have laptops set to sleep on lid close and hibernate after an hour, as well as hibernate on power button press. This means that I can just shut the lid when I know I'm going to resume soon, but prod the power button if I know I'm not going to use it for a while.

The sleep process means that the machine will unsleep and attempt to hibernate after an hour of non-use. It's technically possible for the machines to get 'stuck' while hibernation and turn into a furnace in my bag - but it hasn't happened so far. And I've never had problems in hibernation.