What’s the longest time that you’ve left your laptop on – no full Shutdowns (or even Restarts and Hibernates), just Standbys/Sleeps, and if you’re the iron man type, none of the previous?

My top figure: 2 months. Normally, I would fully shut down my laptop every week, but there was a brutal stretch when I had no recourse but to always put the laptop to sleep (in computer terms, not figuratively!).

The longest time I’ve heard of comes from this NotebookReview.com thread: “the mid January till exams in late May”. Wow. That’s four and a half months for you. How about your beloved laptop?

People unaccustomed to putting their laptops through long bouts of ‘incomplete rest’ might want to ask, does this have any adverse effect on computer, hardware-wise?

From my experience, none – my year-old laptop is still in tip-top shape, the battery life doesn’t seem to have suffered, the graphics card remains a thoroughbred workhorse, and the fan is A-OK. (I hope I’m not jinxing my laptop with these words!)

AlexF from the earlier forum thread has this to say, though:

[Keeping] a laptop on for such extended periods isn’t exactly a good thing:

- Component wear is accelerated by heat.
- Most laptops don’t have very good heat dissipation.
- It is highly doubtful that the tiny little fans on most laptop CPUs are designed for 100% duty cycle over the span of a month.
- Systems with a discrete GPU are even more susceptible to heat damage since you have another heat source in the chassis.

Good points. However, from what I know, the standby/sleep mode produces only minimal (if not negligible) heat. My laptop’s fans are powered down when in standby mode. Also, my laptop doesn’t feel warm after leaving it in standby for eight hours – of course, my room/home office’s airconditioner helps. (It had once frozen my laptop’s keyboard!)

Still, I’m not a laptop expert (my year-old lappy is just my first one), so maybe those with more experience can share their thoughts on this.

And lastly, which is better – sleep/standby or hibernate? The first time I used hibernate, it screwed up all the work that was supposed to have been stored by Windows XP. Since then, sleep/standby has done the trick for me.

I prefer standby over hibernate, as getting out of standby mode only takes a few seconds, compared to the minute or so with hibernate. Of course, the latter actually shuts down your laptop, but saves the system state on your hard disk. This means the hibernate mode should be a tad healthier for your computer when compared to standby.

Here’s a quick comparison of the three options, written by ChrisBrownie:

Shut Down:
Close all running programs and end the session.
Doesn’t draw any power.
Safe to transport.

Hibernate:
Take a dump of the RAM and put it in a .sys file in C:
Doesn’t draw any power.
Safe to transport.

StandBy:
Keep data in RAM. Shut down all possible hardware, including monitors, NICs, VGA etc. Also assuming you use S3 mode, rather than S1, your CPU and fans turn off as well.
Draws power to keep data in RAM
If it’s a laptop? Safe to move. If it’s a desktop? You do the math.

Having written this article, I think I’m off to get some sleep – and my laptop, too.

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