Which is Better: Shut Down or Sleep Mode?

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I just let it sleep most the time. If it's inactive for like an hour it does it on its own. If I leave town for any reason I shut it down.

[Kagthul]

Linus made a video about this awhile back personally I usually always keep my computer running. I read awhile back it actually puts more stress on the parts when you start it up and shut it down then just leaving it run.

False. Read up-thread. Youd have to turn it on and offf every five minutes for years to do anything detrimental to the parts.

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It was a new feature with windows 8.

7 SP3. Though it could have been backported to 7 from 8, as SP3 came out after 8 IIRC.

[PACOX]

My Windows 11 just make the computer reboot randomly when in sleep or hibernate mode so I'm forced to always shutting it off.
Blerghh... checked the advanced log of windows but they all come down to some stupid error in kernel.exe.
Checked RAM etc. but couldn't fix it, no clue what is causing it

Its actually crashing but Windows has gotten good at recovering. Run check disk if it becomes a problem. The issue becomes obvious if your system reboots in the middle of the a scan. Might just need to reseat your RAM, though.

[Linkedblade]

I am always sitting at my pc. I pretty much live at my pc. So my pc is pretty much always on. (I like saying "pretty much".) Then when I feel I need a break from staring at my computer monitor all day, I play a video (a movie or tv show mkv most likely tv show mkv) in VLC media player. And after the video finishes playing and my computer pc detects inactivity say after about 15-30 minutes of inactivity detected, it puts itself into Sleep mode.

Is this alright to do this? Is Sleep mode the same as Shutting down your PC via the power option in Start menu? Or is it better to completely shut down/power down your PC?

The only time I really shut down my pc is to clean out the case, take my can of compressed air and blast out all the dust balls that's been living inside for so long. Which I need to do right now lol.

Also you should give your a computer a break sometimes and let it rest.
Let your computer rest sometimes (put it in Sleep mode or shut it down) from being on all the damn time. Let the thing rest!
I say about at least 15 minutes in Sleep mode (or shut down completely) should be enough to let your computer components rest.

Anyways, which is better for your pc: Shut down or Sleep mode? Or are they pretty much the same thing? Is there no difference other than your PC has to boot up (shut down option) which our PCs literally takes no time to do now (in my other thread "How fast does your PC boot up?")

Up to the end user. There's no real difference on modern hardware. Before hibernate was better on hdd, now it doesn't matter. Sleep might also let you remote in if you wanted to do such.

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My Windows 11 just make the computer reboot randomly when in sleep or hibernate mode so I'm forced to always shutting it off.
Blerghh... checked the advanced log of windows but they all come down to some stupid error in kernel.exe.
Checked RAM etc. but couldn't fix it, no clue what is causing it

What's the specs of this machine? Chkdsk or event viewer may help. There's an issue with bios and undervolting on Ryzen CPUs. If that's the case turn off c-states in bios.

[Bakis]

Its actually crashing but Windows has gotten good at recovering. Run check disk if it becomes a problem. The issue becomes obvious if your system reboots in the middle of the a scan. Might just need to reseat your RAM, though.

What's the specs of this machine? Chkdsk or event viewer may help. There's an issue with bios and undervolting on Ryzen CPUs. If that's the case turn off c-states in bios.

I think it is fixed by disabling the C-State setting in bios. I have not tested yet cos I forgot untill you guys quoted me

But I had some weird shutdown when gaming a few times which happened to have the same symptom and error message/code as the issue I had with sleep mode.
So I disabled C-State and haven't had a crash since so I suspect it will fix the sleep mode as well.
Will goto sleep now and try sleepmode, a few hours would always result in a reboot due to power failure before so I will know when I wake up.
Will try to remember to post the result here.

[Chilela]

For me, it depends. If it's only going to be off for a few hours at most, sleep is my preferred method. If it's gonna be longer than that, I shut it down. Seems like a reasonable enough balance to me.

[ifrah]

Typically sleep unless it's a laptop that would be staying asleep long enough to drain its battery.
What comes to parts wear-out from start/stop cycles, I think those legends are from different era of old (old even by HDD standards) hard drives, and not sure if relevant even then unless you were really mashing the power button.

[nocturnus]

Depends. Windows? I always shut down. Mac? I just close the lid and that's that.

[ati87]

I think it should also be worth mentioning again and again... By default clicking 'shut down' doesn't shut down anymore, and doesn't go through the process of clearing cache, ram, and the like. Thanks fast boot.

You can turn this off, I noticed this as well when I was checking my CPU uptime on task manager a while ago.
With a SSD booting vs fast boot the difference in startup time isn't really noticeable anyway.

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Typically sleep unless it's a laptop that would be staying asleep long enough to drain its battery.
What comes to parts wear-out from start/stop cycles, I think those legends are from different era of old (old even by HDD standards) hard drives, and not sure if relevant even then unless you were really mashing the power button.

Meh might be because we have some devices in our houses that turning it off is not recommended, like central heating.
With Computers it might come from the W98/XP era where turning a computer on took ages.

[meheez]

Sleep mode is something I get when I go grab a drink or a snack.

Otherwise it's always shut down. Btw I'm not sure my motherboard has the option to turn hdd's back on after sleep. So they just disappear.

[xenogear3]

Sleep mode is not safe.
The fan is off, but the RAM is on.

You can leave the PC on with monitor off, as long as you don't hear Hard drive and fan spinning like crazy

[Amarys]

i've always heard that starting and shutting down your pc is hard on computer components. I have no idea if that is true or if that's just a myth. But I leave my computer on all the time. I only turn off my monitor.

It's probably true. I leave all my PCs on all the time and they almost never break. I only had one video card (not counting mice and other peripherals) break in the past 15 years. My parents on the other hand insist on shutting theirs down after every use and they have problems every year with something breaking down. I know it's a small sample size and could be just luck or random coincidence but still.. PCs barely draw any power when sleeping so I don't see any harm in leaving them on.

[Hellobolis]

always used to sleep/hibernate my laptop when i was in school, cause booting it took 5 minutes which was just impractical in such an environment. i imagine nowadays with ssds it's much better.

i shutdown my desktop when im done for the day. the boot time isn't really relevant since i can just get a drink or go the toilet or declutter my desk if it takes a while for w/e reason. i also used to shutdown my monitors but nowadays i just let them do w/e it is they do when they dont get a signal.

[shise]

Modern computers won´t suffer from turning on and off.

It is always best to turn it off. I do it daily. It gives it a chance to restart and solve many conflics which (often) run on the background.