# Is it safe to put your pc in sleep mode?



## Wingo101 (Feb 1, 2009)

My pc goes to sleep after about 1 hour of idle time. Is it safe to put the pc in sleep mode?

Won't it decrease the lifetime of the gpu, cpu, etc. If they are turned off and on straight-away?


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## alexp999 (Feb 1, 2009)

Do you mean leaving ot in standby all the time as opposed to turning it off?


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## Odin Eidolon (Feb 1, 2009)

no, dont think so. do you mean sleep mode or freeze mode. cpu and gpu never get turned off completely. in freeze mode HDDs are turned off. that's the only thing i believe. but dont worry about it.


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## wolfy87 (Feb 1, 2009)

no nothing wrong, even prolongs life, cause your components are working at very small activity, you can also hibernate, and that way save all the work you had on desktop (word text, image editing etc)


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## Polarman (Feb 1, 2009)

If i plan to leave my pc for more than an hour, i'll shut it off completely. Booting up just takes around 30sec anyway.


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## qubit (Feb 1, 2009)

Wingo101 said:


> My pc goes to sleep after about 1 hour of idle time. Is it safe to put the pc in sleep mode?
> 
> Won't it decrease the lifetime of the gpu, cpu, etc. If they are turned off and on straight-away?



It's not a good idea to turn a PC off and on rapidly and/or often, because thermal cycling stresses the components and can cause them to fail early - high performance graphics cards especially. It's all a bit of a grey area this, so if you're doing some testing that requires it, don't sweat over it too much. Disconnect the HD though, if possible.

When I don't use the PC, I always put it into sleep mode instead of shutting it down, because it starts up so much quicker. Because I use Vista, I get the advantage of hybrid sleep, which has the advantages of hybernation and sleep modes - if you unplug it from the mains while sleeping, it just boots up from hybernation instead.


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## wolfy87 (Feb 1, 2009)

Polarman said:


> If i plan to leave my pc for more than an hour, i'll shut it off completely. Booting up just takes around 30sec anyway.



well I have winxp sp2, nothing  tweaked yet, my boot is approx 60sec after I press the power button...kinda looong? :shadedshu


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 1, 2009)

Wingo101 said:


> My pc goes to sleep after about 1 hour of idle time. Is it safe to put the pc in sleep mode?
> 
> Won't it decrease the lifetime of the gpu, cpu, etc. If they are turned off and on straight-away?


It can decrease the lifespan of the RAM, power supply, and especially the motherboard.  The highest rate of motherboard failures I have encountered were often tied to computers that were suspended rather than turned off.


Sleep/suspend mode keeps the memory powered on.  That means those components are subjected to punishment more than they would be otherwise.


Turning on and off frequently (more than every 30 minutes) is also not good for components.


Simply put, if the computer is going to be off more than 30 minutes, power it off.  If not, just turn the monitor off (I don't bother with screen savers because they use processing power when the best way to save a screen is to not have it on at all).


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## Wingo101 (Feb 1, 2009)

FordGT90Concept said:


> It can decrease the lifespan of the RAM, power supply, and especially the motherboard.  The highest rate of motherboard failures I have encountered were often tied to computers that were suspended rather than turned off.
> 
> 
> Sleep/suspend mode keeps the memory powered on.  That means those components are subjected to punishment more than they would be otherwise.
> ...



So then, should I disable sleep mode & just set the monitor to turn off after 30 minutes?


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## Odin Eidolon (Feb 1, 2009)

Wingo101 said:


> So then, should I disable sleep mode & just set the monitor to turn off after 30 minutes?



i set everything to "never" and i turn off the monitor when i'm away for a few minutes. i turn off the pc completely if i am away for more than 30mins


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## Cja123 (Feb 1, 2009)

Well on my old gateway I would put it on standby/sleep every time I would leave the office. I've owned that computer for about 7 years and it's still working. I've used it for gaming and school work. So I don't know how much it affects your computer, but from my experience it seems to be fine.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 1, 2009)

Wingo101 said:


> So then, should I disable sleep mode & just set the monitor to turn off after 30 minutes?


Definitely disable sleep and hibernation modes.  I set the monitor to power off after 3 minutes on my server and 15 minutes on my desktops.  I turn desktops off at night if they aren't working on something.


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