Shut down or hibernate?

edited August 2017 in Hardware
Came across this article a couple of days ago where it says about how should the user turn off the computer for the day, whether it's a shut down command or make it enter hibernation. For me, I have always shut down my laptop after a day's use until I would now put it on hibernate, only when I know I'll be back on it the morning after. Even if I shut it down and boot it up again, it's pretty quick at this anyway but seconds quicker when hibernation is done.

How about you? What do you do after you're done with your machine for the day?


  • I just put all machines I'm using to sleep/hibernate unless I'm not going to use them the next day or I'm doing hardware maintenance/system updates.
  • I generally shut down and suggest all of my users to do the same. Many of the scientists at work only hibernate and I've seen many a computer that's been "on" for months and is just slow as all hell to use. A quick reboot normally fixes those problems and many others.

    I only hibernate when I'm in the middle of something that takes a while to get back to where I was. (Like my Netbeans/XAMPP/git setup, which isn't really that slow but I'm lazy.)

    My home computer does tend to stay on for several days and sometimes weeks at a time, but that's because I almost exclusively use it remotely these days and to run some scheduled tasks. Not much time for games anymore. :( There are occasions where I will hibernate that computer so it is available through Wake-on-LAN and still use less power.
  • Back when used windows 7, I remember all ways putting it in hibernation until my cousin told me that it actually eats up your ram. Since the computer is technically on. In hibernation, the computer saves that state of the OS in RAM. So when you bring it back up, all the things are still there were you left off.

    But now since I use linux/Unix. I usually do a shutdown of the system. Except for my laptop which technically does a hibernation when I close it... Just for the fun of it, here is the code that I use to restart my Solaris server:
    shutdown -y -i 6 -g 30
  • Your cousin's wrong - it saves the state to the hard disk drive. The computer isn't even technically on either, it's completely shut down. Think of windows 10, it partially saves some data to the hard disk drive when shutting down to boot faster when you boot your computer back up.
  • The shutdown or hibernate thing.

    This has already be stated, but both Hibernate and "Fast Startup" save a portion of the windows session to the disk. This caches everything to one spot, and all windows has to do is dump that to ram.

    This also means that a mass number of I/O is being performed on the disk, especially for hibernation.
    Not so much a problem for spinny disks, but for solid states it's hell.

    Especially if you have a large amount of ram. At most, the system is writing the max amount of ram you have during a hibernate to that disk.

    For the fast startup, it should be much less.

    So as for birdy, your cousin is half right. It doesn't quite eat up your ram(though it does mass write) but eats up your, well, disk.
    The only time during a hibernate the computer remains on technically is during "Hybrid Sleep."
    The computer writes to disk as it would during hibernate, but remains in stand-by. The disk write is in case of power loss during stand-by, and the computer can resume.
  • I just close the lid of my Mac when I'm not using it.
  • When I'm done with my laptop for the night, I press the power button to send it into sleep mode. Restart at least once a week for speed and stability purposes.
  • I always put my mac mini in sleep mode at night, and then during the day when I walk away, I just turn off my mouse and walk away. It automatically goes into sleep mode after a while.
  • With my Mac (which is actually just a hackintosh) I just leave it on most of the time. It's pretty power efficient, so I don't mind. With my MacBook Air, I just shut it and it goes to sleep. With all of my Windows computers, I put them to sleep. The laptop I'm currently typing on has been on for over 12 days, and been in sleep mode most of that time.
  • For my main desktop, I leave it on 24/7. It doesn't hurt anything and it's always available when I want to use it. Part of the reason used to be because my desktop was also a file server. But I've had a dedicated file server for a couple of years now.

    For my laptop, I just close the lid when I'm done. It goes to sleep and then after 20 minutes or so it goes to hibernation.

    As far as fast start up goes, yes, Windows 8.x and 10 hibernate the kernel to speed up boot times.

    The only disadvantage to hibernation is that it reserves disk space for the size of your memory. So the only thing you lose is some drive space equal to the size of your memory. In modern times with large drives, it's not really a big deal.
  • I had a main PC that I used to do torrenting with, so it was on all the time. I'd reboot now and then, but often after 3 or 4 or 5 months. Another PC, an old one a friend gave me, used to be put to sleep when I wasn't using it, but after some time, the operating mode of the HDD would be altered (can't remember all the details) and it would then become painfully slow. I did find out how to change the HDD mode, and eventually swapped the contents and use of the two HDDs in the PC. I think that cured it, but I can't quite remember. Both were running XP.
  • I usually shut down my Windows 10 laptop as I don't have much hard drive space for the hibernation file on my C: drive. However I usually just sleep my Chromebook, mostly because I forget to shut it down :(.
  • I Hibernate usually, unless I'm messing with stuff (I usually am though...) And with a 60-gig HDD and 512 of RAM, it isn't too much of an issue.
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