Mac OS X shutdown vs sleep mode

On 6/26/09 at 2:42 PM, johnnyreb242gmail.com (John Smith) wrote:

>Recent Mac convert. I know on windows systems it's recommended to
>not shutdown and restart your computer too often and leave you
>computer on most of the time. I know this is in part because startup
>causes a massive amount of registry changes. Considering Mac OS X
>does not have the infernal windows registry, I was wondering weather
>it is okay to shutdown your computer more often, or if it's better
>to keep it in sleep mode. I have a 13 inch Macbook pro with an
>internal battery and also want to know if it's better for the
>battery to shut down the computer at night when I'm not using it. --

I am a long time Mac user. I am now using my third Mac laptop a
MacBook Pro. I've never had problems shutting down a Mac as
often as I like. But I freely admit to very seldom shutting down
my machine. About the only time I do so is when I am cleaning it
or doing something else where I want to be absolutely sure
touching keys will not do something.

There are standard tasks done daily to maintain a Unix system.
The standard setup has these run around midnight. With a
standard setup, if the Mac is not on during that time, these
tasks are not run automatically. You would have to run them manually.

There are third party solutions such as Macaroni that will run
these tasks at the next opportunity rather than midnight should
you desire to shut down your machine nightly.

My recommendation is to simply connect to ac power and leave
your machine on.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:42 PM, John Smith<johnnyreb242gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering weather it is okay to shutdown your computer more often, or if it's better to keep it in sleep mode. I have a 13 inch Macbook pro with an internal battery and also want to know if it's better for the battery to shut down the computer at night when I'm not using it.

The vast, vast majority of Mac laptop owners rarely turn their
computers all the way off, but rather just let it go to sleep
automatically by closing the lid, and waking up when opening it.

If you aren't going to use it for a week or more, then sure, turn it off.

But otherwise, don't bother, and the reason is actually simpler than
you're making it sound:

Most people are lazy.

In a good way.

If you have your web browser open with a bunch of pages, and are in
the middle of something in 2 or 3 or 10 other programs, it's a pain to
quit everything and relaunch it all later. If you just sleep the
computer, you can maintain state across many, many sessions that way.

Personally, the only times I reboot are when a system update demands
it, and the only times I shut down are when I'm going on a flight and
the FAA demands it. Otherwise, I only sleep my laptops.

--
Chris Devers

--On June 26, 2009 2:42:49 PM -0700 John Smith <johnnyreb242gmail.com>
wrote:

> Recent Mac convert.

Welcome!

> I know on windows systems it's recommended to not
> shutdown and restart your computer too often and leave you computer on
> most of the time. I know this is in part because startup causes a massive
> amount of registry changes.

This is horrible advice. The main reason not to turn off Windows is so
automatic updates will install properly. Personally I recommend turning off
Windows for 2 reasons:

1) Just sitting there a windows machine tends to be vulnerable to attacks.
Not as much in recent years but you still see critical patches from
Microsoft for remote exploit vulnerabilities on services that are always
running.

2) If you have been infected most likely your machine is being used as part
of a botnet to send spam. It can't do that when it's off, gives the rest of
us a break from spam onslaughts.

Also the registry doesn't change that much on a reboot, but a successful
reboot will create a clean backup of the registry. Always good to have
those on a single point of failure. Also if your machine crashes when not
in use (an unfortunately frequent occurrence on Windows) it can corrupt the
registry. Shutting the machine off prevents this.

> Considering Mac OS X does not have the
> infernal windows registry, I was wondering weather it is okay to shutdown
> your computer more often, or if it's better to keep it in sleep mode. I
> have a 13 inch Macbook pro with an internal battery and also want to know
> if it's better for the battery to shut down the computer at night when
> I'm not using it. --

Personal preference. Sleep consumes slightly more electricity but turns on
much faster. Hibernate (deep sleep) doesn't use the electricity takes a bit
longer to boot but not as much as a full power up. I don't think it really
matters to the battery, but it will recharge fastest when the computer is
off.

I use an offline backup service so I leave my Intel mac mini on so it can
backup at night. I have another mac mini (PPC) hooked up to my tv. That I
turn off.


Kevin

am 27.06.2009 11:10 Uhr schrieb tidbits-talktidbits.com unter
tidbits-talktidbits.com:


> I have a 13 inch Macbook
> pro with an internal battery and also want to know if it's better for the
> battery to shut down the computer at night when I'm not using it.

Every PowerBook I owned so far, from the first 150 to the G4 Aluminium
PowerBook I put only to sleep. I carried them around in sleep mode, they
were on my desk in sleep mode, and everything was fine.

The PowerBooks were only rebooted in case of hangs or - now with Mac OS X -
when an installation requieres it.

With Mac OS X even my desktop Mac is only put in sleep mode.

I got used to the computer being available on just a click with the mouse...

Udo

On 6/29/2009 3:08 PM, "Bill Rowe" wrote:
> There are standard tasks done daily to maintain a Unix system.
> The standard setup has these run around midnight. With a
> standard setup, if the Mac is not on during that time, these
> tasks are not run automatically. You would have to run them manually.

This was true under older versions of Mac OS X. These days, if your Mac is
asleep when the Unix maintenance scripts are supposed to run, they'll simply
be run sometime after you wake up the computer.

At 15:08 -0700 UTC, on 2009-06-29, LuKreme wrote:

[...]

> On a laptop, there's no reason to ever shutdown.

Well, it still does draw *some* power. If even just to for the sleep light.
IIRC, it's about 2 or 3 Watt or so on recent machines, depending on the model
-- Apple has a KB article on it somewhere.

> First thing I do on a
> laptop is enable safe sleep mode

I thought "safe sleep" (aka "hybernate" -- writing contents of RAM to disk),
is the default since about 1 or 2 years.


--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Lukreme wrote:


> Computers in generally prefer to be on 24 hours a day, 365 days a
> year. That said, it is not really reasonable for most people. OS X
> does have numerous tasks that it performs during the night, although I
> believe in 10.5 those tasks are run at the first opportunity if your
> machine is off or asleep at midnight.
>
> On a laptop, there's no reason to ever shutdown. First thing I do on a
> laptop is enable safe sleep mode, and then sleep is the only thing
> that machine ever does.

I came into this thread quite late, so my question may have already been answered.

What happens if your computer is in sleep mode while you are away on vacation and your local area is hit by a massive thunderstorm?

Does sleep mode protect your motherboard from being zapped?

Paul

While the original poster mentioned a laptop, this question comes up often and is certainly not limited to portable machines. There will always be those in each camp, with any type/make of computer. My feeling is that, unless your machine is doing something useful, turn it off. Period.

OTOH, I make sure that all Macs I support ARE doing something useful. My choice is Stanford University's Foldinghome <http://folding.stanford.edu/> with the Team Mac OSX <http://www.teammacosx.com/> distributed computing system. But there are many other similar programs. What I'm talking about is a distributed computer set up that works on some kind of project that has real opportunities of making a difference in health, science or something important to mankind. Find one that you'd like to support <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects> and help someone, today. :-)

As usual, I'm different. My laptop is used now and then (and almost
never carried anywhere any more), and when I do use it one of the
things I do is open ssh sessions to Linux machines. Since I don't want
those dying if unattended, the machine is set so that it doesn't sleep
automatically. When I'm finished with it, I generally shut it down--I
have no expectation that what it is doing when I shut it down (or put
it to sleep) bears any resemblance to what I want it to do next time.

I do sleep the laptop overnight now and then to get the periodic tasks
run (Friday night to Saturday morning every 3 or 4 weeks takes care of
the daily and weekly tasks, and overnight last day of month to first
takes care of the monthly (which really doesn't have to run every
month any more, since Apple dropped the accounting out of it.

With Leopard, if the machine is sleeping at periodic task time, the
tasks are run at wake up time; if it is off they are not run. (With
Tiger, they weren't run.)

The iMac also often has ssh connections going; sometimes I close them
out and sleep the machine and sometimes I just let it deal with the
monitor and disk but keep idling.

  --John

What is deep sleep?

François

I know, I know that sleep is appropriate for laptops and indeed, all Macs, but I find one problem with sleep mode and MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

I put my sleeping computer in my backpack/portable office/shop and occasionally when I get to my destination, I find that the computer has been awakened, is hot as a two dollar pistol and the battery is run down. I believe the reason is that the Sudden Motion Sensor, which is designed to prevent hard drive damage if the computer is dropped, is activated by a bumpy car ride and may be kept awake by some web page looking for updates.

Anyone else have such an experience? Think my explanation of the Sudden Motion Sensor is reasonable or probable?

Chris Harnish

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Chris Harnish<charnishmac.com> wrote:
> I put my sleeping computer in my backpack/portable office/shop and occasionally when I get to
> my destination, I find that the computer has been awakened, is hot as a two dollar pistol and the
> battery is run down. I believe the reason is that the Sudden Motion Sensor, which is designed to
> prevent hard drive damage if the computer is dropped, is activated by a bumpy car ride and may
> be kept awake by some web page looking for updates.
>
> Anyone else have such an experience? Think my explanation of the Sudden Motion Sensor is
> reasonable or probable?

That's not supposed to happen, and it may be worth bringing it in to
get checked out.

My understanding is that when the laptop is sleeping, the hard drive's
heads should be parked so that they can't damage the platters if the
drive gets jostled; the Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) only comes into
play when the machine is fully turned on.

If the laptop is turning back on while the lid is closed, it may be
that you're having a malfunction with either the Reed switch (the
sensor that detects when the lid gets closed or opened), the logic
board ["motherboard"], the wiring that connects them, etc. Or, heck,
maybe you have something metallic or magnetic in your backpack that is
interfering with the Reed switch and causing it to come out of sleep
mode.

The easiest thing you can try, short of a hardware repair, is a System
Management Controller (SMC) reset. The procedure for doing this is
different on different models, but regardless of the model, it's
documented on Apple's support site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411

If you're still seeing this behavior after an SMC reset, my guess is
that it's a hardware fault, and you need to get it fixed.


--
Chris Devers

On Jun 30, 2009, at 11:08 AM, airbusdriver wrote:

> While the original poster mentioned a laptop, this question comes up
> often and is certainly not limited to portable machines. There will
> always be those in each camp, with any type/make of computer. My
> feeling is that, unless your machine is doing something useful, turn
> it off. Period.
>
> OTOH, I make sure that all Macs I support ARE doing something
> useful. My choice is Stanford University's Foldinghome <http://folding.stanford.edu/
> > with the Team Mac OSX <http://www.teammacosx.com/> distributed
> computing system. But there are many other similar programs. What
> I'm talking about is a distributed computer set up that works on
> some kind of project that has real opportunities of making a
> difference in health, science or something important to mankind.
> Find one that you'd like to support <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
> > and help someone, today. :-)

I have Berkeley's Setihome running on my iMac and plan to get it
going on some of my other Macs. Boinc.berkeley.edu has numerous
others besides Seti.

GO BEARS!!

Dave Clark
www.clarklawfirm.com
http://daveclarkimages.smugmug.com
http://twitter.com/dave30c

Den 30/06/2009 kl. 20.08 skrev Chris Harnish:

> I put my sleeping computer in my backpack/portable office/shop and
> occasionally when I get to my destination, I find that the computer
> has been awakened, is hot as a two dollar pistol and the battery is
> run down. I believe the reason is that the Sudden Motion Sensor,
> which is designed to prevent hard drive damage if the computer is
> dropped, is activated by a bumpy car ride and may be kept awake by
> some web page looking for updates.
>
> Anyone else have such an experience? Think my explanation of the
> Sudden Motion Sensor is reasonable or probable?

I only had that experience a very few times. The first time was with
my old Clamshell, where I had installed an airport card (many years
ago :-) ), and had failed to lock down the keyboard properly, so that
sleep never occured when I closed the lid. With my Powerbook and later
Macbook Pro, I have had the issue where the latch had gone open for
some reason and the computer had sprung awake again. (yes, they are
very worn...) I have also on a few occassions over the years seen a
process refusing to go to sleep and that way keeping the computer
alive after closing the lid.

I don't think any of my laptops have been shut down for longer time
than it takes to change the hard drive or similar ever: sleep is the
way to go. Even for changing battery I just let them deep sleep.

Best,

Kim

On 2009-07-01, at 06:08, Chris Harnish wrote:

> I put my sleeping computer in my backpack/portable office/shop and
> occasionally when I get to my destination, I find that the computer
> has been awakened, is hot as a two dollar pistol and the battery is
> run down. I believe the reason is that the Sudden Motion Sensor,
> which is designed to prevent hard drive damage if the computer is
> dropped, is activated by a bumpy car ride and may be kept awake by
> some web page looking for updates.

Seems more likely to be another trigger. I would put the Mac to sleep
and see if you can recreate the problem: do things like squeeze and
warp the case to try and activate keys/trackpad. Don't be too harsh,
nothing more than would happen in your bag!

There's also messages in the system log about what caused the wake
event though they can be hard to interpret.

Are you sure it's all the way asleep? I've had occasions when I closed
the lid but it didn't actually sleep . . .so if I'm putting it in the
case I hit the power button and select sleep . . .then wait until the
screen goes black and the drive spins down before closing the lid.

On 6/30/09 at 11:08 AM, patroshhotmail.com (Paul Atroshenko) wrote:

>What happens if your computer is in sleep mode while you are away on
>vacation and your local area is hit by a massive thunderstorm?

>Does sleep mode protect your motherboard from being zapped?

The short answer is no, the function of sleep mode is not to
protect your system from voltage transients on line power. Of
course, if the system is *disconnected* from AC power, there can
be no issue. But if the system is connected to AC power directly
(no surge protector) then there is some level of risk regardless
of sleep mode.

Note, the issue of protecting against line transients is not
restricted to computers. Any modern electronic device simply
will not like large voltage transients. The amount of damage
done (if any) will vary greatly from device to device and is
strongly dependent on design details of the device that are not
usually provided to the end user.

On 30-Jun-2009, at 12:08, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> At 15:08 -0700 UTC, on 2009-06-29, LuKreme wrote:
>
>> On a laptop, there's no reason to ever shutdown.
>
> Well, it still does draw *some* power. If even just to for the sleep
> light.

Not if you pop the battery. Safe Sleep is *brilliant*

> I thought "safe sleep" (aka "hybernate" -- writing contents of RAM
> to disk),
> is the default since about 1 or 2 years.

Wasn't the default on my brand new MacBook Pro.

 On Jun 30, 2009, at 1:08 PM, Chris Harnish wrote:
> I put my sleeping computer in my backpack/portable office/shop and
> occasionally when I get to my destination, I find that the computer
> has been awakened, is hot as a two dollar pistol and the battery is
> run down. I believe the reason is that the Sudden Motion Sensor,
> which is designed to prevent hard drive damage if the computer is
> dropped, is activated by a bumpy car ride and may be kept awake by
> some web page looking for updates.
>
> Anyone else have such an experience? Think my explanation of the
> Sudden Motion Sensor is reasonable or probable?

You may want to try to type "sudo pmset lidwake 0" (without the
quotes) or use a utility like iLid
<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24703/ilid> that does the same
thing.

I used it on my Al Powerbook to prevent it from wakening when the lid
was jostled. It will wake on keytouch or spacebar but not on opening
or closing the lid. I don't know if the sensor wakes the MacBook or
not, but it is probably a lid issue.

Ray

--On July 1, 2009 12:22:27 PM -0700 Bill Rowe <readlistssbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> Note, the issue of protecting against line transients is not
> restricted to computers. Any modern electronic device simply
> will not like large voltage transients. The amount of damage
> done (if any) will vary greatly from device to device and is
> strongly dependent on design details of the device that are not
> usually provided to the end user.

Some power companies are offering whole house surge protection. Mine does
for $5.95 a month, with a $10,000 annual warranty. Not all power companies
have this, but you might check with yours. (in kansas city the rate for
surge protection isn't part of the regulated rates so it can go up, but it
hasn't so far while our power rates have gone up several times.)

<http://www.kcpl.com/residential/Meter_Pro.html>

Might sound expensive compared to a couple of surge protectors but it
should be noted that:
a) it protects other equipment too such as your refrigerator and air
conditioner.
b) you need to replace those surge strips every couple of years (more
frequently if you live in an area with a lot of surges) anyway. This plan
includes maintenance of the surge system.

Meter based protection only protects against surges external to the house,
but if your house takes a direct hit from lightning you probably don't need
to worry about the voltage surge. If a large piece of equipment fails
inside the house in such a way that it causes a voltage surge, then you
might have a problem. These are fairly rare compared to lightning storms
(in the mid-west at least.)

Kevin