Best practice for laptop: sleep or shutting down [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Computer care: Hibernate, Sleep or Shut Down?

My laptop takes forever to load up. I normally don't ever shut down. I just close the lid and put it in my bag. Is this a practice or it doesn't really matter?

Answer 1

I tend to do the same thing, this would only be a problem as far as I can tell if you leave it in there long enough that the battery dies (it takes power to keep data in ram). If you ran it down it would be the same as just turning it off incorrectly anyway, which isn't a huge issue of you use a journaling filesystem like ext4.

Answer 2

Consider using the Hybrid Sleep option instead; it doesn't use battery power and it may resume more quickly:

Hybrid sleep is another new power-saving feature designed primarily for desktop computers. Hybrid sleep saves any open documents and programs to memory and to your hard disk, and then puts your computer into a low-power state.

Unlike mobile PCs, desktop computers typically don't have battery-based power backup. So if a sudden power failure occurs to a desktop computer in standard sleep mode, data loss could occur.

But with hybrid sleep turned on, Windows can restore your work from your hard disk. On desktop computers, hybrid sleep is typically turned on by default.

When hybrid sleep is turned on, clicking Sleep automatically puts your computer into hybrid sleep. When hybrid sleep is turned off, or if your computer doesn't support hybrid sleep, clicking Sleep puts the computer to sleep.

To turn hybrid sleep on or off:

Open Power Options by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, and then clicking Power Options.

On the Select a power plan page, click Change plan settings under the selected plan.

On the Change settings for the plan page, click Change advanced power settings.

On the Advanced settings tab, expand Sleep, expand Allow hybrid sleep, and then do one of the following:

If you are using a mobile PC, click On battery or Plugged in (or both), click the arrow, and then click On.

If you are using a desktop computer, click Setting, click the arrow, and then click On.

Click OK, and then click Save changes.

• Quoted from here.