We just bought a laptop for my wife…it’s 1/2 the price our desktop cost 5 years ago and about 6 times more powerful - wow how times change.
I’ve managed to make Vista look like XP, and set things up so my wife is in good shape using it (she’s not the techie of the family).
However, we’re not sure how best to handle the laptop when not in use. Our desktop goes into sleep mode, but it’s on all day. We don’t want to kill the laptop, and the options appear to be to either leave it on and use sleep mode when not in use or simply turn it off and allow it to boot back up when she wants to use the laptop (this would be 3-4 times per day).
My wife never turns hers off. Just lets it sleep. Comes back to life with a push of the power button or enough diddling with the mousy-pad. I kill it and restart it every so often just to give windows a break.
My Dell notebook has three choices, sleep, hibernate, and on/off. I choose hibernate, which copies the active memory to the hard drive and powers down. When power comes back on, it brings that file off the hard drive into memory. The hibernate boot time is about one-third the time of the full on/off reboot. Sleep comes back right away, but I don’t like the power drain.
A desktop computer left on 24/7 uses approximately $1 a day in electricity, not to mention the ecological impact. Notebooks use about 1/5 the electricity of a desktop, even less if sleep mode is used, but it is still measurable. I do a clean boot every now and again because Windows seems to like that.
I like to discharge the battery every two weeks or so, to keep it available for cordless use. If always plugged in and never discharged/charged, some laptop batteries will die within six months.
The power saving software on laptops has gotten pretty advanced. On my
Gateway laptop, if I leave it in sleep mode for about 20 minutes, it powers
back up long enough to hibernate. So, no matter what you do, they tend to
figure out what’s best for themselves… You can see the power settings by
bringing up the control panel and looking for something like Power Settings
or Power Options (not sure what they call it in Vista). On my laptop, I can
set it up to automatically hibernate, or standby if the battery power reaches
critical (which is good, because if the battery runs out, you tend to loose your
work).
I tend to hibernate most of the time if I leave it, because I tend to be away
for more than 20 minutes.
I just reread this… does your laptop not have a hibernate? It should… it might
be a crescent moon icon on one of your keys as an extra option if you hold a
Function modification key (mine is on the F3 key). What brand of laptop is it?
It’s a compaq, but it’s nowhere near me now since it’s with my wife. She found the hibernate option using the start menu. I’ll have to look for a function key that would hibernate it and check the settings. I was surprised how little documentation came with the laptop - it seems like it’s assumed you know what you’re doing. There are probably a billion help menu items that explain everything, but the old manuals with desktops gave you a pretty good idea how to handle the beast without getting very technical…I miss that.
OK, now I need to rant a bit. It truly seems like those commercials about Vista being buggy are correct. IE tends to just disappear from time to time (I wish she would let me install FireFox - which she might if IE keeps acting up on her), and the “gadgets” (on the grey bar of the desktop) seem to periodically claim they’re unsafe (they came from microsoft!) and turn themselves off.
Microsoft is also annoying cheap. We have Vista Home Premium which comes with a trial of microsoft office products (word, excel), but the only permanent option is Microsoft works which most publishers (my wife writes) won’t accept. Luckily, Open Office is available which is what we use on our desktop…but out first computer in 97 came with Word and Excel as standard for the old Window’s version.
Thanks everyone for the advice on the shut down/hibernate/sleep mode issue!
I set mine where if you close the lid it sleeps, open it it wakes up. I leave it like that all day and at night when I go to bed I put it on hibernate. When I travel with it I turn it of totally as recommended in the instructions. I also use it on just battery every couple of weeks to run it down and then recharge it, I do this because my intuition says to, I don’t know if it prolongs the battery life or not.
i had to do this , when i saw the mac mentioned by Emmline .
i am fairly new to the flat earth society of mac , and i wonder if these Chuck Norris ism’s might just as easily apply to the that operating system.
(apologies for jacking the thread..)
macs don’t sleep , they wait
macs don’t have search enjines , they stare at cyber space , until it gives up the info
macs don’t have clocks , they decide what time it is .
worms and trojans check to see if there is a mac buried in the their system .
