[fnj]

I'm somewhat new to the laptop world and am a little confused about the whole "sleep" vs. "shutdown" thing. Is there any danger to just putting my ibook to sleep rather than shutting it down? I realize that I will be draining the battery, but I tend it to leave it plugged in unless I am Airporting around the house.

[mark2]

I've had my ibook for over a year and it runs 24/7. I just put it to sleep. And I use my ibook at work and at home so it puts in some long days; I've never had a problem with it that wasn't caused by my ignorance.
The one piece of advice I would give you is to get Apple Care. smalldog usually has good prices on this. Just do a Google and you'll find them. You have a full year of warranty on repairs, but only 90 days of phone support. If you buy Apple Care you will get another 2 years of warranty on repairs, for a total of three years and, you will have phone support for the whole time. The phone support has been extremely helpful to me. I call whenever my ibook hiccups.

[Peter]

My iBook always sleeps, it can last 5 days alsleep so everywhere it goes, it just snoozes along.

[nredman]

sleep...i read somewhere that it uses more powering starting up your ibook then it does putting it to sleep for along time?? i dont know if that is true but anyways i put my ibook to sleep.

[fnj]

Thanks for the responses. Sleep it is!

Funny, I would never think of doing such a thing with a Win machine! I would be forgoing the benefits of a fresh reboot.

No such concerns with a Mac!

[leffo]

I agree with all the posters above. I never power off my iBook and basically just reboots after OS updates. And when my caches seem to fill up and I begin to experience UI sluggishness I just run the basic UNIX cleanup-scripts. I usually run them through the Terminal with:

Code:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

but using an application like Coctail works just as well.

[The Placid Casual]

Another vote for sleep...

Not being too *nix savvy, I use 'Macjanitor' to clean thing up now and again, but thats about it...

Marc

[AssassyN]

Apple's notebooks are extremely efficient during sleep. They drain around 1% of battery life per hour they're asleep.

I always follow my own rule that if my machine will be used again within 24 hours, I just put it to sleep. If it's gonna sit un-used for over 24 hours, I shut it down.

I've ran my 17" PowerBook over 3 weeks just sleeping every night w/ no shut downs at all and it never slowed down at all.

[Stratus Fear]

Originally posted by nredman:
sleep...i read somewhere that it uses more powering starting up your ibook then it does putting it to sleep for along time?? i dont know if that is true but anyways i put my ibook to sleep.

This seems to be the case usually, at least for me. Leaving my iBook asleep overnight usually tends to drain the battery around 2-3%. I've already started OSX on a charged battery and gone down more than that because the hard drive works so much loading the OS.

[Stratus Fear]

Originally posted by fnj:
Thanks for the responses. Sleep it is!

Funny, I would never think of doing such a thing with a Win machine! I would be forgoing the benefits of a fresh reboot.

No such concerns with a Mac!

If you have a properly setup and maintained Windows machine, it works pretty well. I've been using suspend to ram type standby on my XP desktop for weeks now without a restart and it hasn't slowed a bit or shown any problems. It takes longer to wake up than any Mac or Windows laptop (about 7-10 seconds) but it's still faster than waiting for it to boot (even though that is still under a minute anyway).

[klinux]

Originally posted by AssassyN:
Apple's notebooks are extremely efficient during sleep.

Duh, any computer (for Windows camp, ACPI compliant machines) is very power-efficient during sleep.

Also, not to be nit-picky, if you are putting your computer (desktop or laptop) to sleep you are not running it 24/7!