[Dazed]

Having never owned a laptop before i don't know if its safe (or advisable) to leave it on 24/7.

When not on the road, I was thinking of connecting it to my monitor and keeping it running all the time like I do with my existing pc desktop. If i do have to put it to sleep, how quick is the restart ?


on a side not, does anyone use the belkin flip ? I dont have my MBP yet to test it on but it says it support osx and so was just curious if it works as flawlessly as it did with 2 Desktop PCs.

Thanks

[kick52]

ok.. it does not damage your MBP to leave it on, though it might waste battery if you dont have it on the charger.

sleep is probably the best and only takes about 5 seconds to wake.

[phobos]

You can leave it on. No problem there. I own a powerbook 667MHz DVI (yeah it's a really old laptop!!!) that I always leave on. Consider that the 667 version was one of the hot laptops that nobody would advise to leave on all the time and constantly run cpu, disk intensive things on it. Nothing is fried in this crammed 1inch space. Everything still works fine. And don't worry much about ruining your battery's life. The battery stops taking a charge on 97% or close to that, to protect it from constantly charging thus preventing shortening its life cycle. My battery has started to wear thin after 3 years of constant use.
So use your laptop just like you would use a desktop.

[Tuoder]

I put my computers to sleep instead of turning them off, and I haven't seen any premature deaths. I don't think that the HDD in the MBP is rated for 24-hour use, but it is probably set to spin down after a period of inactiity anyway. I say it is fine, but sleep is advisdable. It is only a few second's wait.

[stuppy]

I leave mine on 24/7 Doenst sleep at all as it cuts everything off and i have Direct connect running on parallels.

Ive done this with several laptops over the years never any problems

[Zeeb]

Occasionally I have problems with my MBP when leaving it on. I thought I saw the sleep light when I put it to sleep only to discover a laptop so hot I couldn't touch it sometime later. That couldn't have been good for its components and its happened a few times. It wasn't on fire or anything but I wonder what might have happened if I had left it like that for a week.

I would advise you turn off the computer completely if you're going to leave it behind and not check on it for a week or so.

[BadApple]

I also leave my Macs in the sleep mode. Even my 4.5 years old Ti has been okay with this arrangement. When I take my iBook out in the computer bag, I usually keep it in the sleep mode. As long as it does not open the lip while transporting, Mac will stay asleep. I typically use snug-fitting sleeve to make sure the notebook will stay closed if I am going to keep it sleep. So far, my C2D MBP stays cool while sleeping.

[aryayush]

I have bought a brand new MacBook Pro and I leave it on 24/7 without sleep with just the display off when I am not using it. I have also set both fans to rotate at 6,000 RPM and above constantly.
I don't think anything will happen to it - it better not. If it does start showing problems related to the battery or any hardware, then I guess Apple's fame hardware design is flawed after all. But I don't think any of that will happen.

[ghporter]

24/7 won't hurt the MBP. It will waste a lot of electricity, though not as much as your PC desktop being left on 24/7. I ALWAYS turn off a computer that's not going to be used in the next hour or so, particularly my PC desktop (which is both loud and power-hungry).

I still haven't figured out why people resist turning off a device they're not using.

[fisherKing]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

24/7 won't hurt the MBP. It will waste a lot of electricity, though not as much as your PC desktop being left on 24/7. I ALWAYS turn off a computer that's not going to be used in the next hour or so, particularly my PC desktop (which is both loud and power-hungry).

I still haven't figured out why people resist turning off a device they're not using.

sleep.
just put it to sleep.
insignificant power draw,
uses less electricity than powering it up!

[SierraDragon]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

24/7 won't hurt the MBP. It will waste a lot of electricity, though not as much as your PC desktop being left on 24/7. I ALWAYS turn off a computer that's not going to be used in the next hour or so, particularly my PC desktop (which is both loud and power-hungry).

I still haven't figured out why people resist turning off a device they're not using.

The truth is that modern Macs with reasonable energy management settings that spin down hard drives and dim screens do not "waste a lot of electricity." The electricity used is miniscule.

Some reasons people resist turning off a device they're not using are:

• Some folks consider the effect of extra heat cycling computer componentry from full on/off to be at least as deleterious to the box as the effect of 24/7 operation with energy saver controls.

• Many folks find instant-on without needing to reopen a dozen applications very convenient.

-Allen Wicks

Edit: Anyone who sees excessive heat develop during sleep operation needs to either figure out why and fix it, or shut down the box when not being used. Even though today's MBP controls are lots better than earlier laptops, anomalies do happen. For that reason I do fully shut down my laptops when they will not be used for more than two days (which is seldom).

[simonjames]

I thought OS X (unix) did some maintenance tasks in the background and at odd times. If this is the case then the powerbook needs to be left on and not in sleep mode. Or you have a utility that runs these housekeeping jobs as and when needed.

[ghporter]

Unix was originally built for server operation, and servers stay on 24/7 because you can never tell when a user needs access to the server. But server access was always lowest in the middle of the night, so those Unix internals were built around that being the best time to run maintenance tasks because it would impact users the least. That's no longer a fixed requirement in OS X 10.4 because Tiger manages uncompleted maintenance tasks better than previous versions of OS X-it notes when they haven't been accomplished and runs them while the machine is on.

On the other hand, in reference to SierraDragon's post, ANY electricity used by an idle machine is wasted. Over time that small waste adds up and becomes a lot of waste, and that particular wasted energy summed over a large group of computer users equates to tons of carbon in the atmosphere that don't need to be there.

The components in modern (as in through the last ten years or so) computers are immune to any "thermal cycling" problems too. They're built to handle high operating temperatures, and since those temperatures are reached pretty quickly on turning on the machine, that thermal cycle tolerance is part of the design. And how is spinning down a drive that's not in use different from turning it off as far as the spindle motor is concerned? I agree that instant on is "convenient." But since it takes about 30 seconds to boot a modern Mac, isn't that close enough to "instant" for most people, particularly after a long period of inactivity? And again, modern hardware handles starting without the "strain" computer lore attributes to starting CPUs and hard drives, so that's not a real reason to avoid turning a computer off. The relatively short term increase in power consumption at startup is brief enough that it compares quite favorably to sleeping for a short period (probably around the 2 hour point, but I don't have enough reliable data to say that's a fact). And with the number of pieces of hardware that people in Western cultures "need" to have instant access to, every little bit of conservation helps a lot.

My comment about heat in the backpack has more to do with letting the machine cool after active operation than anything else. I don't want to provide any sort of insulation that would keep the MBP warmer than it needs to be, and the sleeve I put it in and the pack I carry the sleeved computer in have lots of very insulating padding. I don't expect "a lot of heat" from a sleeping computer, but it's still not smart to run one on a blanket-or in a neoprene foam sleeve-so I take the conservative path.

[mduell]

Say a sleeping Mac draws 2 watts; at $0.20/kWh, that's 0.8 cents in electricity.
Assume it takes you 1 minute to get your applications set up just the way you had them when you shut down. If you make more than $0.48 per hour, you've lost money by shutting down and restarting rather than just sleeping.

I run sleeping computers (OSX and Windows laptops) in neoprene sleeves and backpacks all day. When I pull them out, they're cool to the touch.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Say a sleeping Mac draws 2 watts; at $0.20/kWh, that's 0.8 cents in electricity.
Assume it takes you 1 minute to get your applications set up just the way you had them when you shut down. If you make more than $0.48 per hour, you've lost money by shutting down and restarting rather than just sleeping.

I run sleeping computers (OSX and Windows laptops) in neoprene sleeves and backpacks all day. When I pull them out, they're cool to the touch.

As I said, I'm pretty conservative in this regard, and if it takes me a minute or more to set up my applications, so be it.

Thanks for the note that sleeping Macs don't get or stay hot in neoprene sleeves. I may start sleeping the MBP between classes.

[pcummins]

Sleep mode works wonders. I've slept/woken my PowerBooks thousands of times over the course of about 5 years, no problems. The power draw is minimal, but I guess if you could wait longer you could enable true hibernate mode which powers everything down (RAM included) for even more power saving, at a cost of time to wake up. For Windows I use hibernate as I use the PC so infrequently I can handle the wake up delay (about 30 seconds or so). That is, if hibernate works properly (sometimes it doesn't, neither does suspend).

I don't recommend running laptops 24/7 unless you have to or you have tuned and tested the system to spin down the hard drives properly. Most hard drives have a claimed MTBF and duty cycle, and laptop drives are generally lower in both as they assume non-24/7 operation. (They generally can handle spin up/down a lot better, however). I'd keep an eye on it with tools such as SmartMonTools to see if it's starting to keel over on you.

[tooki]

My Macs have always lived on 24/7, just using sleep when not in use.

tooki