Sleep, shut down or hibernate?

[Tiberius]

My computer is a laptop, and I take it to work with me in my bag so I can surf the net while I'm out and about.

I've been thinking lately, is shutting down my laptop best when I'll probably be back on it in half an hour? Are there any problems that can be caused by carrying a laptop around in hibernate mode?

I'd love some advice.

 

[Geckothan]

Hibernate (aka suspend to disk, which just saves the contents of virtual memory to the disk and then powers down completely) would, imo, be safer than sleep (aka suspend to RAM), as there's less risk of bizarre corruptions upon waking if your RAM is a little unstable or your battery dies or is removed while sleeping (there's still risks with hibernation if your OS boots normally instead of resuming when it wakes up for whatever reason, as the filesystems won't be in a clean state, but it's unlikely).

There's very little reason to shut down, with power management being so reliable in most OSes these days. Cuts down so much on wasted time when you can just hit the power button and go straight back to what you were doing.

 

[Xip]

I use hibernate for my laptop and never had a problem with it. I only let it completely shut down when it's getting slow. Just make sure that it's really in hibernate and not still shutting down though, I once packed my laptop too soon and that fried my battery. Now I wait for all lights to go out.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I always hibernate my laptop when I take it to work. Never had a problem. Windows' hibernate feature has actually worked just fine for me since Windows 2000.

 

[Christopher]

When I bought my new laptop (and then had problems with the battery and needed to take it into the store for repairs), the folks at the store told me hibernation was horrible, that you should never do it because it corrupted the disk and screwed up your settings and whatnot. That seemed puzzling to me, so I researched the question and found that they were hugely overreacting. Hibernation is nothing more than saving the current state of your computer to the hard drive, so that it can restart to that exact same state. Yes, it involves writing a large file to the drive, and sure, theoretically using the drive more can shorten its life expectancy, but you're basically just using the drive for what it was meant for, storing data.

Hibernation only becomes a problem if you use it exclusively, because over time there's data and stuff that builds up (I don't recall the technical details) and slows the computer down. But it should be fine to use hibernation regularly so long as you shut down completely every once in a while -- once a day, once a week, whatever's convenient -- to clear out the memory and start fresh.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Actually, the memory corruption issue doesn't seem to exist in Windows 7. I know XP had some memory management problems, so running the same session for a long time (hibernating in between or simply leaving it running) eventually results in an unstable system that has to be rebooted. But Windows 7 has much better memory management and I find I can run a single session for weeks without problems--in fact, basically the only time it reboots is when it installs a system update.

You are right that the people at the store were exaggerating.

For what it's worth, I believe all the major Linux distributions can hibernate, too.

 

[Xip]

for windows 8 you actually have to look for the option to completely power down, so hibernating can't be that bad

 

[Cutter John]

No problems with Hibernation here either. I know when I ran XP I left it running all the time because for some reason when my system woke up, it would run i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and I had to reboot. Hasn't been an issue since I moved to Win7.

 

[Tiberius]

Thanks for the advice guys!

 

[Geckothan]

Any OS that can't survive months of uptime without instability probably sucks, btw.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Any OS that can't survive months of uptime without instability probably sucks, btw.

Well, we are talking about Microsoft operating systems, so that goes without saying.