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Ask HN: Do you power off your laptop?)

5 points by Slashed ↗ HN
I know this is a stupid thing to ask here on the Hacker News. Sorry for wasting your time. I was wondering, how many people don't power off their laptops for like a month, a week? I didn't do it for about two weeks now and I feel I have to do something about this habit:) What about you?

18 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 87.3 ms ] thread
amackera
I always power off my gear when I'm not using it.
protomyth
yep, but I travel a distance and don't like to leave the MacBook Pro running in my bag.

I will probably change my attitude when I can get an SSD.

mattheww
I turn it off on weekends. It's easier to remember where I was the day before if I leave everything open.
nfnaaron
I almost never powered off my Dell XPS R 450 for ten years; laziness and the theory of avoiding powerup/powerdown stress on connections. It lasted ten years. I replaced one of the two HDs once. I got rid of it for noise and not worth upgrading it to modern capabilities, and the ginormously large and heavy CRT monitor finally gave out.

I use my laptop as a desktop replacement (see above). I rarely power it down, although Ubuntu boots pretty quick.

Slashed
Ten years! Amazing.
nfnaaron
I'm cheap. Although it's an excellent question whether I spent more in electricity than I saved in fixing/buying systems. But I definitely saved inconvenience.
rodrigo
I have a macbook wich i almost never power off, i see it as one of its advantages; is it a bad practice?
Slashed
To be honest, I don't know if it's a bad thing to be running a laptop for months. I come from the background of using desktop PCs mostly and I must say, I had bad times with running them non-stop for months.
icefox
Does putting it to sleep / closing the lid count?
weaksauce
I put my mbp into deep sleep. Best of both worlds, quick startup, long battery life, saves the HD from being jostled when it accidentally gets turned on in the backpack, and it remembers where I left off working.
thingie
Well, it's a laptop, so I suspend it when I go somewhere (which is quite often, as it's what I am supposed to do with it). But when I am home for a longer period of time and go out without a need to have the computer with me, then it can run uninterrupted for months. So, no, I don't power it off, only suspend, if it has to travel in a backpack.
gaoshan
I have a Macbook and after about a week of continuous, heavy, use (I do web development on it so I may have Netbeans, Terminal, a billing app, Safari, Firefox, a Virtual Windows XP environment, vim, Mail, iTunes, iChat and an assortment of taskbar apps all running full time) I find it gets quite annoyingly slugish. A reboot refreshes things. I have only 2GB of RAM so that is probably part of the problem as I end up with more paging out I probably should.
Slashed
Yeah, the same story with me. Though I don't own a macbook and not using Netbeans(I use GEdit for most web development stuff and Eclipse for C-programming), have 3GB of RAM, I still reboot it about every four days.
ax0n
Macbook C2D 2GHz ca. december '06. Upgraded to 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD. Used mostly for Firefox, Virtualbox (OpenBSD and Ubuntu), iTunes. I only power it off when it locks up. That happens anywhere from every few days to every three weeks. Most lock-ups occur when I'm trying to tether via BlueTooth. Other than that, I just close it, wait for the LED on front to indicate that it's done storing RAM to the hard drive (it does that just in case the battery fails) and then I go.

Current uptime: 9 days, 8:23. About par for the course, I suppose.

dustingetz
make sure it hibernates (stores ram to drive then powers off), or it uses significant battery while its in your bag.
LeBleu
I turn off my work laptop every day before undocking it to bring it home. I believe HP does not claim that this model supports hot docking. Also, if I forget to turn it off, it gets really hot in my sealed laptop bag...
kennu
MacBook, never power off. Just close the lid while travelling.
JamieknighT
Running a MacBook here too, tend to make it sleep, shut it down every now and again if not required. Adverage time between shutdowns I possibly a few weeks?