[sandman]

I know this thread has probably been posted before so I apologize in advance to those of you who hate people who are too lazy to do a search but.... My father is one of many of his kind who have always shut a computer down after each use simply because they have always done it. I have tried many times to convince him that Mac OS X is designed to be put to sleep and rarerly if ever needs to be fully shut down. Can someone send me a link to an article from Apple discussing the reasons and advantages (time being the obvious one) for putting the computer to sleep rather than shutting it down every time.

Thanks in advance,

Sandman

[ghporter]

Take a look in this forum-there's a current discussion of who does and doesn't shut down their Macs. From a power usage standpoint, off is better than sleep, and from a time standpoint, it never has taken very long for either my wife's iBook or my MacBook Pro to boot for either of us to think that the time issue is that critical. And unless you have dozens of windows open all the time and their location and settings are critical (to you), then the advantages of sleep (in my opinion) are negated unless used for a relatively short period of time.

On the other hand, rebooting cleans up the occasional memory leak, ensures your hardware is restarted properly (there are many users whose AirPort cards don't automatically find the network after sleep, and rebooting ALWAYS fixes it), and so on. I am obviously NOT a big fan of sleep instead of off.

[TETENAL]

Sleep and "Off" (which is really a kind of stand-by) make a difference of less than 1 Watt *). That's not very much, but it is still a little bit. For the exact consumptions see the following "environmental attributes" specs:

Apple - Environment - APES

Personally I never shut down my laptop because of the convenience of sleep. I use this machine irregularly with many breaks inbetween. Powering it off all the time would be too annoying. I never had any problem with that. The occasional reboot due to a software update every 4 weeks definitely suffices to "clean up the occasional memory leak and restart hardware properly" that Glenn talks about. OS X is very stable in this regard and rarely needs that.
My desktop computer I turn off at the end of the day. Work on it is done, so there is no point to have it sleep. That would be a waste of energy.

Whether sleep or off is better for your father depends on his usage pattern. He probably understands that OS X doesn't need a regular reboot, but powers off anyway because he knows he won't need the computer for some time. That's fine. Let him.


*)
ps: On a consumer Mac. I looked up the energy consomption of a Mac Pro 3 GHz Quad-Core and the difference makes more than 6 Watts. I would definitely prefer to power off that instead of sleep.

[sandman]

Thanks for the replies guys. I don't think my father has any concern over the power issues. He thinks its healthier for the operating system which I seem to remember an article in the early days of Mac OS X addressing. It said something along the lines of there being no reason to regularly shut down the computer with Mac OS X. I'll see if I can dig it up but thanks again for your comments.

[ghporter]

TETENAL, thanks for the link. I never could find any of the power consumption figures on Apple's site, but I wasn't looking in the right place. Overall, I agree with you, with the exception that every watt counts and adds up in how much carbon and heat are emitted into our atmosphere. Doing my part on that is pretty much worth a bit of annoyance. On top of that I am often not sure when I'll next get a chance to use my MacBook Pro, so it's usually off.