hibernate, sleep, or shut down?

[On2wheels]

Recently I'm wondering if I should be putting my home system into some low power mode overnight before resuming use the next day.

Do more people use hibernate mode or just shut down? With some other threads talking about deleting the hiberfil.sys file if you have more than 4gb ram, doesn't that disable hibernation? So is there a way to not use a swap file but still use hibernation?

What about background apps? I like to use MSI afterburner, I suppose I could shut if off manually before hibernation, but I wouldn't want to leave Steam or other apps running before hibernating, would I?

This would save a bit of hydro, and some wear and tear on fans, but of course folding isn't really worth it then. Curious what other people do.

[enaberif]

people shut their systems down?

I've never used any of those 3 ever on a desktop. at the most I tell it to turn off the monitor after a half hour.

[Shadowmeph]

the only times I have shut down my pc was when I was running on air and it was very hot outside ( no air conditioning ) or when I accidently pressed the off switch on my Diamond remote which just logged my pc out and I think it goes into sleep . other then that my pc is always on

[dandelioneater]

If you're power consumption concious, I would just put it to sleep (S3) instead of shutting down. One might argue that its hard on components to be booting a cold system all the time, but I've never run into that problem.

[ilya]

Originally Posted by enaberif

people shut their systems down?

I've never used any of those 3 ever on a desktop. at the most I tell it to turn off the monitor after a half hour.

Until Windows 7, I ALWAYS shut down my non Linux systems after using them. My old boss used to tell me you could eventually run into annoying kernel issues if you didn't do so, especially on Windows systems. I have no idea if it's true or not. But now hybrid sleep is just too convienient to ignore.

[Bond007]

I am still on XP, but I have and still do always shut down. Interested to follow this thread and see if maybe I will change that. That said, the first computer that was totally mine is now 10 years old and still used a few times a week for some various useless stuff at a friends place. It was and is used and shut down all the time with no problem ever. I had it on and shutdown daily for the first 6-7 years of its life.

[On2wheels]

Yeah Bond, we have some Win95 and even a Windows 3.1 pc at work that's used weekly, shut down every night. Good ol Hewlett Packard.

[sswilson]

I've been using hibernate for my Acer win7 tablet, but have just started wondering if a full shutdown / restart might not actually be quicker than hibernate onan ssd.....

Other than that.... my non-portable PCs have always been left on 24/7.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by ilya

Until Windows 7, I ALWAYS shut down my non Linux systems after using them. My old boss used to tell me you could eventually run into annoying kernel issues if you didn't do so, especially on Windows systems. I have no idea if it's true or not. But now hybrid sleep is just too convienient to ignore.

I've successfully had Windows machines run for more than 30 days before a restart due to software or hardware caused me to lose that.

Windows prior to 2000 would end up having memory issues where the system would get slower over time and become non-responsive but Windows XP changed that and now you can pretty much leave your system run as is.

[frontier204]

On my main rig with SSD and 8 GB RAM, I'll either use non-hybrid sleep or shut down (when I'm in the mood that its fan noise is annoying me).

"Sleep" is also called Suspend to RAM, so that's why it's fast. The contents of your memory stay there, and the computer keeps the RAM powered on while in the low power state.
"Hibernate" is Suspend to DISK, or whatever medium your hiberfil.sys is kept on. All the contents of your RAM is copied to disk and then the computer is shut down, so if you have a lot of RAM (like my desktop's 8 GB) and your disk doesn't have very good sequential read speeds, then it may take almost as long as a cold boot to get working again.

On my laptop I only use shutdown because it's dual boot and I don't know which OS I'll run when I decide to open it up again.

As enaberif noted, you should normally be OK with suspend/hibernate and resume for very long periods of time. You will have problems if you have bad / unstable overclocked memory, or bad drivers that don't know how to handle sleep mode (more common on Linux than Windows, I've found).