Isn't an additional potential problem of sleeping your Mac that the chances of what's being stored in the memory corrupting increases, as you're increasing the time it's stored there?

Having said that, my Macbook hasn't been shut down in days now, I took your advice Nick and I put it to sleep instead. The battery rarely drains more than 1% overnight.

My iMac takes around 30 seconds to start up and around 5 seconds to shut down.

The iMac takes around 5W or so to sleep, between 1 and 2 when "off", plus the power brick for the MyBook, plus the brick for the Toshiba drive, plus my monitor, plus my PC, plus switch, plus router etc. They all consume a little bit of power, even when they are off / idle, let alone sleeping. It isn't much on a day to day basis, but add that up over a year, it is several Euros.

Given that I am often at my girlfriends, the machines are often sitting around for several days without being turned on. Plus I am at work most of the day, so why do they need to suck money out of the mains when I'm not even there? I therefore simply switch off the power switch on the 10 way extension cable when I leave the house.

Thanks Gav, but I like the start-up chime. It re-energises my Apple smugness.

I'm pretty sure something does get written to the HD before it finally nods off. I've noticed it takes markedly longer to sleep when there's lots of stuff I've been working on.

Roffle =D

I assume you were being ironic there right?

Might be because I have a new Mac (fresh install rather than... new) but it only takes about 15 seconds to fully boot up. Shut-down takes about 5 seconds =/

When it's been sleeped it's about 5 seconds to boot up. Might not be instant because I only had 512MB RAM when I slept it, but still. Difference isn't noticeable. I turn it on when I get out of bed, by the time i'm back from the bathroom it's ready.

I may be missing something here but I can access all my photos etc... from FireFox.

In the file browser select Media (or something) on the left hand side. This then shows you all of you iPhoto events and then clicking on one takes you in to the event and shows you all of the photos.

Sleeping needs some electricity. Turning off at the mains need no electricity.

Electricity costs money, no matter how little you use. QED a sleeping Mac uses more electricity compared to a Mac which isn't plugged into the mains. Therefore more electricity is used and that additional electricity has to be paid for.

If I switch my iMac off at the mains for 4 days, it consumes 100% less electricity than if I leave it sleeping for 4 days. That means that it saved 100% of the energy and 100% of the cost of that energy.

Even when the iMac is switched "off", it still draw over 1W. Fujitsu have just released some of the first "0 Watt off" PCs, well, they use 0.1W when off or sleeping, but that is still 0.1 more than 0!

Likewise, I have no figures, but your computer's transformer will continue to drain power if you shut it down, but don't unplug it/turn it off at the mains. How much extra power does a computer take during startup (if any)? Does this outway the amount of power spent sleeping?

I'm not sure the 1% battery loss over a week that I have experienced is going to make much difference.
I know what you're getting at Dave, but how much does 0.1w cost? Would I rather spend that little bit and have greater convenience and better performance sooner? (My MacBook runnnig leopard seems snappier after being on for a day than it does when it first poewrs on).

You could get rid of the computers completely and save even more electricity.

There comes a point where convenience outweighs minimal cost.

Any power saved during sleep is lost on a laptop when restarted. as now the battery is not so fully charged and has to use electricity in recharging. If turned off completely less battery power is used as only needs to keep clock going.

Either way, just think of everything else.

I don't need electricity running through my amps and monitors for them to "boot up"... because they don't boot up. And they're draining power too.

It's worth bearing in mind that removing the power supply completely will drain your P-RAM battery faster over time. The P-RAM battery stores various settings (such as time and date, startup volume setting etc), and when this motherboard battery is dead it can lead to unusual things happening. If you shut the Mac down, but keep the wall socket turned on (live) then the Mac doesn't resort to using the P-RAM battery - it only uses that when there's no power coming in.

If you keep the Mac plugged in when it's shut down, then the P-RAM battery is likely to last the life of the Mac (7-10 years?), but if you also turn the wall socket off altogether then the P-RAM battery is likely to be drained well before then (2-3 years?) and will require replacing - not sure how tricky the battery is to replace on the iMac, but I suspect you have to practically dismantle the whole case to get at it. Therefore, that's probably going to be expensive to do.

We have a few old G4s here at work in storage as they're not used any more, but I still keep them plugged in at the main, otherwise when they do need booting up, the batteries will probably be dead - luckily the old G4s are very easy to replace the batteries, however, not all models are that accessible.

I don't think I have shut down my MacBook in months. Maybe I should.

I'm afraid that you have both completely missed my point, Dave and Angelic.

Forquare seems to be on the same wavelength, though.



My original post, basically wrapped up into one nice neat little sentance!

Last time we had such a thread, it was on Windows machines. I think it turned out, if you were sleeping for more than 8 hours, it used more power than switching off and on.

If I am going to be using the PC or Mac during the course of the day, I sleep it, but over night or when I go out to work etc. I switch everything off.