Possible Duplicate:
Is it bad to put your computer in sleep mode every time?
I do not shut down my laptop (os:vista). Instead I always make it sleep. Are there any bad consequences of this approach?
Possible Duplicate:
Is it bad to put your computer in sleep mode every time?
I do not shut down my laptop (os:vista). Instead I always make it sleep. Are there any bad consequences of this approach?
Obviously, if your laptop is sleeping and you lose AC power (ie on a desktop computer) or the battery goes completely flat, your RAM cannot be refreshed and you lose all state. That's why hibernating is better if this would be a problem.
As for the effect on your battery, it depends entirely on the type of chemical composition used in the battery. eg Lithium-Ion and Nickel MEtal Hydride have different charging, usage and lifetime recommendations. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery
If you forget that you have it on sleep instead of hibernate, and you for some reason take out the battery, then that could frag your hard drive and not play nice with the OS.
I believe that using sleep/standby when not having the laptop plugged in is actually beneficial to battery life, supposing a lithium battery is used.
As explained in the wikipedia article, battery life is best kept at 40% charge. So not having your battery fully charged all the time should help.
I've seen a detriment on the disk usage which eventually and with the time makes it harder for the OS to restart ( assuming Windows here )
All the RAM used by the system is serialized into large files chunks which, seems to me like they never get purged.
The more I used to hibernate my laptop the worst it's performance seems to be.
That's why I always turn it off. Even though it takes more time.
Is there a good reason to not Hibernate?
It saves battery and does not need power connected.
But, you do need a hibernation space as large as your RAM -- is that your problem?
In years and years of experimenting with audio apps on both Windows XP and OSX, I can assure you that no system wakes up from "sleep" mode with all of its marbles in place. If you're just browsing the web, sleep mode is fine, but I prefer to either keep the computer running (which I do, generally, 365 days a year) or shut it down completely.