Sleep or shut down?

[Solitaire U.]

Ok computer nerds, I want your opinions.

Lately, I've gotten into the habit of putting my comp into sleep mode instead of shutting it down. I started doing this because my 1TB HD is at about 85% capacity, and it's taking from 3 to 5 minutes to boot up and become fully functional from a cold start-up. It's not a problem with the comp per se, just that it's taking time to start up a lot of processes.

For example, if I try to open Firefox as soon as the desktop comes up, it can take up to a minute to open, and even then sometimes firefox is unresponsive for another couple minutes.

More like 5 minutes if I try to start something demanding, like a game.

Putting it into sleep mode is much faster. Everything's ready to go instantly.

I do shut down and restart once a week or so to clear caches etc.

A friend has advised that this is somehow bad for my computer, but I don't really understand his explanation. "The memory is always running." was how he explained it.

Is that bad? If yes, why? It seems like my comp is straining a hell of a lot more to boot up from a cold shut down state than to 'wake up' from sleep.

I'm more worried about prolonging the life of my computer than I am about saving energy, so this isn't a 'green' question.

So what puts less wear and tear on the machine? Putting it into sleep mode when it's not being used and restarting it once a week, or doing two shut-down/cold restart cycles a day?

 

[TheScornedReflex]

I sleep it. I am to lazy to wait the 43sec for it to boot. Unless I am leaving the house for work. Then I shutdown. I am not sure if it is good or bad for the computer though.

Edit: that's the laptop. My desktop is a beast.

 

[Valentas]

Dude, you don't know how to play with computers. Buy SSD + external hard drive, keep your stuff in external hard drive and use SSD power to enjoy fast boot up and responsive OS. I have never been happier with SSD when it came to coding: no lagg at all.

Also if you are on Windows, then use Windows 8. On my Dell laptop it boot ups in ~10 sec.

EDIT: 9.5 seconds to be exact, I measured the time. In Windows 7 it takes ~ 19 seconds.

 

[Alex_]

Having a lot of data on your hard drive should not make boot-up any slower, specially if you have it in a separate partition. Consider uninstalling unnecessary software, and using `msconfig` and `services` to see what is starting up with Windows and disabling the automatic startup of unnecessary processes - but be careful, do not disable what you don't know.

If you were wise and stored all that data on a separate partition from your operating system's you can format the OS partition without loosing any data and it should boot up as quickly as ever. I'd advise to install the Debian distribution of the GNU/Linux OS instead of Windows.


As for the sleep / shutdown thingy:
Consider hibernating the computer instead of putting it on sleep mode. Sleep mode doesn't actually turns off the computer, it just "pauses" it, saving energy, whereas hibernation copies the RAM to the hard drive and shuts everything down, so when you boot up again you only have to wait the boot process instead of the boot process + all applications to load (which seems to be the problem) E.g. if you had INTP forum opened when you hibernated the computer, it's the first thing you'll see after boot up.

Depending on what you are running there is no need to shut the computer down, like, ever. Take servers for instance, they are computers like your, and if they shut down then the website, game or whatever it is that is running on them goes off-line. Some operating systems are designed to be used both as server and/or desktop, and are stable on both "modes". Debian is an example, CentOS and RedHatEnterpriseLinux are others, although the second and the third are mostly used as servers.

 

[Solitaire U.]

Dude, you don't know how to play with computers. Buy SSD + external hard drive, keep your stuff in external hard drive and use SSD power to enjoy fast boot up and responsive OS. I have never been happier with SSD when it came to coding: no lagg at all.

Also if you are on Windows, then use Windows 8. On my Dell laptop it boot ups in ~10 sec.

EDIT: 9.5 seconds to be exact, I measured the time. In Windows 7 it takes ~ 19 seconds.

My question was "Is it bad for a computer to sleep it instead of shutting it down?" I don't care about any of the stuff you mentioned, and couldn't justify spending money on it even if I did.

Though you're welcome to make a donation. I'll send you my paypal info...

 

[Solitaire U.]

Depending on what you are running there is no need to shut the computer down, like, ever.

Thanks.

 

[Architect]

I sleep whenever possible. The bad for your computer argument is so 1980's, now we know it will be obsolete long before that even matters.

 

[Jennywocky]

Windows 8...lolz.

 

[Duxwing]

I sleep whenever possible. The bad for your computer argument is so 1980's, now we know it will be obsolete long before that even matters.

Two Questions:

1.) What if you've built The Goliath? I know that you won't, but the hypothetical awesomeness is just too alluring.
2.) What if you've built your computer yourself and have room to expand within its tower?

-Duxwing

 

[Architect]

Two Questions:

1.) What if you've built The Goliath? I know that you won't, but the hypothetical awesomeness is just too alluring.
2.) What if you've built your computer yourself and have room to expand within its tower?

-Duxwing

Especially then, otherwise it would heat up the house too much

 

[RadicalDreamer31]

All your posts didn't read. I saw SSD though.

Put your OS and major use programs on SSD. SSD IS THE TITS. Files and crap on HDD. Built my computer this way a year ago, it's still minty fresh and ballin'. From power on to blender rendering in less seconds then I have fingers.

 

[Cognisant]

Sounds like you have a virus or something to me, how old is the computer?

You could defrag your hard drive if you really think the amount of data is the issue, but the amount of time it takes to do things suggests to me either your processor or RAM is in its death throes, or there is some huge number of processes running which could be the result of a virus that has replicated itself several hundred/thousand times.

 

[Duxwing]

Especially then, otherwise it would heat up the house too much

You could extract useful work from that heat: send the Goliath's heat into your home heating system and the thermostat will adjust your burner's output automatically, thereby preventing overheating. An example of a similar technique applying this principle can be found in the four public heated swimming pools built over the heat sinks of a European supercomputer.

-Duxwing

 

[Architect]

You could extract useful work from that heat: send the Goliath's heat into your home heating system and the thermostat will adjust your burner's output automatically, thereby preventing overheating. An example of a similar technique applying this principle can be found in the four public heated swimming pools built over the heat sinks of a European supercomputer.

Expensive way to swim. Neat idea though.

But shows we're really doing it inefficiently. I think our present day supercomputers are at or close to the computational capacity of the human brain, which does it on the equivalent power of a small light bulb.

 

[Duxwing]

Expensive way to swim. Neat idea though.

But shows we're really doing it inefficiently. I think our present day supercomputers are at or close to the computational capacity of the human brain, which does it on the equivalent power of a small light bulb.

And not even electrical power, either. Just ATP.

-Duxwing

 

[Solitaire U.]

Sounds like you have a virus or something to me, how old is the computer?

You could defrag your hard drive if you really think the amount of data is the issue, but the amount of time it takes to do things suggests to me either your processor or RAM is in its death throes, or there is some huge number of processes running which could be the result of a virus that has replicated itself several hundred/thousand times.

It's a four year old HP Elite e9120f AMD Phenom II x4 910 processor and 8gb RAM, and running Vista. It's been a great out of the box machine but it's always been somewhat slow on the boot-up. Like I said though, just the first couple-three minutes are laggy. After that it's fine.

No viruses. Haven't defraged a comp in years, or this one ever that I can recall. I'll do it on Monday before I go to work.

Hmmm...disabled auto-start on Steam, X-FIRE and Skype, updated Firefox to the latest version, and now I can open Firefox immediately. That seemed to help a lot.

Thx for the suggs.

 

[Cognisant]

And maybe ditch Firefox for Opera, and yes yes I know that's sacrilege to some and if you actually use the add-on's well more power to you but for a browser that's just being used for browsing it can be advantageous to use something simpler.

 

[Vrecknidj]

I just put my machine into sleep mode 90% of the time. Once in a while I hibernate it. I never turn it off, though I do sorta turn it off whenever I reset it.

Any argument I've ever heard for this being bad for a computer hasn't made any sense to me. My own laptop has good enough energy settings that I can leave it this way and not worry about using up electricity.