Sleep or Shut Down

jtsuited

A long time ago when i had my powerbook I remember hearing that it was a good idea to shut down as little as possible and putting the computer to sleep was always the thing to do.
THe guy who told me really knew his stuff, and i've kind of presumed it to be true.

However I am starting to question whether all that sleeping adversely effects my battery health.

So my question is: is it better for the macbook pro (i recently upgraded) to be sent to sleep when not in use for say 2-3 hours or is it better to shut down?

Sad Professor

Whether it's better for it or not I don't know. Starting up from cold puts more stress on the components. But when asleep your mac is still essentially off, there's just a small amount of power being fed to the RAM to keep it charged so as to retain the state of the machine. Everything else, hd, display, still has to turn on so it's really about convenience. For 2 or 3 hours (or more) I'd definitely just let it sleep. I never shut down my 4 year-old ibook and it often goes unused for a day or so. I'm not sure what effect this has on battery life. I wouldn't worry about it anyway, it's best to get your money's worth out of a machine.

babypink

sleepy time!!!

i often 6/7 days between restarts and my PB is in sleepy mode quite often during that, with no ill effects at all.

leeroybrown

Put it to sleep. It's not going to have any adverse effect on your battery. The only thing that is likely to adversely affect your battey is running it off power permenantly and not discharging it from time to time.