Laptop: standby or shutdown

[Gavin Harris]

Out of interest what's the best thing for a laptop - to shut it down or just to leave it on standby?

My main reason for leaving on standby is that "booting up" is pretty much instant, which means I'm not wasting battery waiting for it to boot completely.

However, I'm aware that being on standby does run down the battery, but I presume very slowly.

What would you say is best when out and about?

What do you do with your laptop?

 

[Optegris]

Shut it down and have a brew while it's booting up

 

[Gavin Harris]

LOL, I do that when I'm on my main PC... but my laptop I use when out and about - usually on the train. There's no way I'm paying £2 for some dishwater cup of tea on the train whilst waiting for it to boot up

 

[user123123]

Hi,

I heard somewhere that you should never put a PC on standby (dont know why we have the option then?), because the power surge required to get it back up and running is the same as that used when just booting it up - so putting it on standby a few times a day causes the same damage as if you were turning it off and on a few times a day..(power surge to the hardware) while the power saved on standby is not much compared to just leaving it on and turning off the moniter and speakers etc.

I would have thought that the case is similar with laptops, but not sure..

but now I just leave my desktop on unless I'm not going to use it for a long while, in which case i'll turn it off.
Laptop the same really.

 

[Gavin Harris]

while the power saved on standby is not much compared to just leaving it on and turning off the moniter and speakers etc.

Didn't realise that - I thought all of the current "memory" was written to the hard drive and everything was turned off.

Maybe I should use the term hibernation, if there's a difference between the two?

 

What laptop & desktop do you have? My machines take under 1 minute to boot up after shut down :|

 

[Gavin Harris]

Previously a Dell laptop - which took a while to boot up, hence why I always pressed the suspend button on it, but I've just bought one of the new Windows EeePC laptops, so am wondering what's the best way to use it!

 

[user123123]

Maybe I should use the term hibernation, if there's a difference between the two?

I think hibernation is better for saving power than stand by - but I also think the power surge thing is still true with both standby and hibernation.

 

[pawel]

Didn't realise that - I thought all of the current "memory" was written to the hard drive and everything was turned off.

That's hibernation. The entire content of the RAM memory is "dumped" to the hard drive and then restored during the boot.

Maybe I should use the term hibernation, if there's a difference between the two?

When the laptop is in stand-by/sleep mode, RAM memory is kept powered to preserve its content, so it just turns off the LCD, fans, hard drive etc. Because the engergy is being consumed to sustain the memory, this mode will drain your battery where hybernation won't.

 

[WhatManufacturersWant]

LOL, I do that when I'm on my main PC... but my laptop I use when out and about - usually on the train. There's no way I'm paying £2 for some dishwater cup of tea on the train whilst waiting for it to boot up

Ah, many's the time we used to leave our labtop in stanby mode. It's a marvelous feature. You leave the screen exactly where you want it, walk into the customers office knowing the thing will be exactly where you want it to discuss his requirements. Open up the screen and press the space bar with a self satisfied smug grin on your face (this will show him).

What???!!!!

Horror!!!!!!

Nothing happens!!!

Something (it can be anything, that's the nature of standby) has restarted the b*****d thing and it's flattened the battery. Of course your power lead is back at the office because today is that day when you forgot it.

Turn it off. Reboot it when you get there while your discussing the journey, weather or the price of fish before you get down to the nitty gritty. It's a lot less risky.

 

[dink78]

if it's a pc, shutdown. if it's a mac, still shutdown. however, i find that macs have a better "hibernate" mode as opposed to PCs

 

[Courir]

Been using Standby for years with various different IBM Thinkpads. Only issue I have ever had is the once in a while crash when it fails to wake up. In this case you simply hold the on button down for 10 seconds and it reboots.

Best practice is to make sure you have saved documents first before entering standby. Then if something goes wrong all you have is a quick reboot.

Off for a meeting next so will put my X41 in standby and when I get in front of my customer opening the screen and it is ready to go with the presentation already loaded!

Give it a go - best of luck, Mike

 

[ozbon]

Personally, for the most part I shut down. As others have said, it doesn't take much for a standby/hibernate to restart and then run the battery down.

I also prefer to go through a clean start-up - although if I'm seeing a client, as Courir said above, it's easier to use standy, and open the lid for the presentation. That just makes sense.

But in general, I tend to shut down rather than hibernate. It's a personal thing, and I just prefer it that way.

 

[dink78]

OT: i love how thinkpads retain their "geeky" look (maybe it's just me who thinks that...) - i love how it's colored almost flat black, squared edges, and the blue-colored "enter/return" key.

 

[Courir]

OT: i love how thinkpads retain their "geeky" look (maybe it's just me who thinks that...) - i love how it's colored almost flat black, squared edges, and the blue-colored "enter/return" key.

True, I do like the Thinkpads and this is coming from someone who is dedicated Mac in every other way! It is just that I have an important Excel spreadsheet or two with VBA that Microsoft does not incoude with the Mac version that keeps me with the Thinkpad!

I use the X41 Tablet too as it is nice and small and suitable for use on the train. You can get them for a really good price on eBay now and, for MS Office, they work superbly. Nice touch with the screen swivelling too - which helps with presentations.

 

[cmarks]

For the past year, I've always just closed the lid on my mac notebook (mainly because I had something come up, and forgot about it, etc etc), the battery suffered a lot because of it, and I left it for a week when I went away - dead on return. So yeah, as above shut it down, discharging and charging batteries is a sure fire way to prolong the life of a battery, but with each full discharge, you loose a small percent of the actualy capacity it can hold.

 

[Page]

All the options are there as they have different uses!

I find standby great for moving a laptop between home and work. Otherwise it seems to take about 10 mins to boot up. But yes save everything first.

(Yes it has a lot of software on and it is all there for a reason)