Which is best for a Laptop?

[KM Richards]

Which is best for a Laptop?
Sleep mode when not in use, or turning it off and rebooting all the time?

My laptop that is being delivered soon is going to be a secondary machine but will be used at least once a day on most days.

So, I'm curious what the resident experts think would be best for the laptop as I obviously want it to last as long as possible.

[glc]

Hibernate it. Laptops aren't designed to be left on 24/7.

[KM Richards]

So hibernate is in between turning it all the way off and leaving it on standby?
I assume hibernate should be better than turning it off and rebooting.

[Stuey]

I personally use standby mode without any problems, but that's because I use my laptop throughout the day.

Hibernation basically saves from the active memory to the HD and reloads it all upon wake-up. The hardware completely turns off though, so yea, it's just about midpoint between standby and shutdown.

[mairving]

The default settings on most should be sufficient.

[kilgoretrout]

If your main concern is about "wear and tear" on your laptop, I don't think hibernating vs shutting down will impact the useful life of the laptop one way or another.

Hibernating is suppose to give you a faster bootup by saving the contents of ram to disk and restoring the system from there on reboot. In practice, I haven't found it to be all that useful. I'd just do a regular shutdown and boot up if I was only using the laptop once a day.

[LeftyAce]

If you don't want to go through closing and saving everything, it's better to hibernate than to leave the computer on while it's not in use. There's so little space in laptop cases that dust accumulation is an issue with the fans running all the time, so if you can hibernate it, it's good to do so.