Okay, so I know that it’s safe for a laptop to not have proper clearance from its vents while it’s powered off, even plugged in. This makes sense, otherwise no one would be able to transport their laptops in most bags, what with the padded sleeves they use.
But what about when it’s asleep? Can you still put it into one of those sleeves safely? I mean, it’s technically OFF, yet technically still on. I guess I’m not sure how sleep mode works, which is why I ask.
Thanks!
Yes. I do this all the time.
So while a laptop (a Macbook Pro in my case) is asleep, it doesn’t have the need for ventilation while it’s on? So what is the difference, inner working-wise, between an off computer and a sleeping one?
When it’s asleep, the only thing powered is the RAM - everything else is turned off, so very little heat is generated. My MacBook can sleep for around five days, so you can see that it’s not using much power.
Huh, so the RAM being on is all that’s needed to “boot things up” immediately from sleep? Interesting. And it doesn’t use enough power to require adequate ventilation. That’s good to know, since when I travel with my laptop, I may want to leave it sleeping, in case I want to use it later, or otherwise store it in a place that may not be ventilated enough were the computer on.
I almost never turn my machine off. I leave it in my computer bag asleep every weekend. The only thing to make sure of is that the machine is actually asleep - If you close the lid and then unplug your mouse, you will wake the machine up. You want to make sure that the light is “snoring.”
OK. I don’t use an external mouse (or anything else right now, for that matter, that plugs in), so I should be fine there. 
Thanks! (Though if anyone else wants to chime in to further enlighten, please do!)
Well, my laptop would get just as hot in the provided backpack when it was sleeping as when it was on. I generally wound up hibernating it instead. The fact that it didn’t still leach power from the battery was nice, too.
But I hear that newer laptops can maintain the power to the RAM a lot more efficiently. So it doesn’t surprise me that newer laptops don’t overheat while sleeping. Still, hibernating instead of sleeping won’t hurt much, if you don’t mind the 30sec to 1min wait before your computer becomes usable again.
Offtopic, but do sleeping laptops still wake up at like 3% power and then hibernate? Because, if not, you’ll want to either hibernate or shut down if you aren’t going to use it for a while. How long “a while” is depends on how much power you lose by sleeping, obviously.
By default Macs use “safe sleep.” This writes the contents of RAM to disk before sleeping. If the battery fails completely during sleep, when power is re-applied, the data is read back off the disk and everything is hunky-dory.
What’s the difference between hibernating and sleeping? Is that a Windows-only thing? Which is closer to what’s called “sleep” in the Mac? (The overheating, not the memory retention, is the part I’m wondering about.)
If its standby mode, then yes, you need ventilation. Standby is just a minor power saving mode, lots of hot things still run.
If its in hibernate mode then no, you wont, as its pretty much off.
In OSX, I believe sleep is hibernate.
Hibernate writes the contents on RAM to the hard disk, and then powers off the machine. On power-up, the RAM is restored from the disk, and the machine resumes where it left off. It’s a reasonably time-consuming process, since several GB of data may need to be read.
There is no hibernate in the Mac world.
There is only sleep, with Safe Sleep as the default (as I mentioned above). Safe Sleep combines the quick response of sleep with the safety of hibernate - in typical Apple fashion it lets you do 'the right thing" without needing to make a decision at sleep time.
There’s safe sleep (see below) or hybrid sleep (Vista), or you can configure the laptop to change power modes after X amount of time. Mine falls asleep after 5 minutes and then hibernates after an hour.
Hibernate (as the name might suggest) is kinda a deep sleep.
Sleep turns off most devices but keeps the current state of the system written to RAM and uses just a trickle of electricity to keep that data there. When you wake it up, you can go back to work in a few seconds. Modern systems can usually stay asleep for days without draining their batteries.
Hibernate takes that same data and writes it to the hard drive and then turns off the system completely. It uses even less power (virtually none) and then loads all that data back to RAM when you turn it on again. It takes about 1/2 to 2 minutes to get back to work, and modern systems can usually stay off (which is what hibernation does) for months without draining the battery.
I’m not sure what this standby mode you’re referring to is (I’ve always understood standby to be equivalent to sleep), but in OSX sleep is not hibernate; it’s sleep just like in Windows.
In Windows, you can manually tell the computer to hibernate. In OSX, you can tell the computer to sleep, but any time you do it’ll automatically write the data to disk so the system will recover as if from hibernation following a power loss (meaning a shorter get-back-to-work-time). I do not think you can manually ask OSX systems to hibernate.
If you’re not hearing any noise from the laptop then it should be perfectly safe to put it in a bag. If you’re hearing a hard drive spinning or fans, or if the laptop stays warm after 15 minutes of “sleep” mode then I wouldn’t block the vents.
On Macs, all you need to do is watch the power light. If it’s “snoring” (slowly pulsing) the machine is in “deep sleep” (very low power) mode. If not, the machine isn’t asleep, and shouldn’t be put in an enclosed location.
>it’s sleep just like in Windows.
There is no sleep in XP. Just standby and hibernate.
This is one of my pet peeves. Why does the industry need to keep changing the terminology. So it turns out OSX has a standby mode they call sleep and a hibernate mode they call safe sleep. Err, yeah, good job guys. Now Vista has sleep, hibernate, and a hybrid sleep mode. keep up the crappy work computer industry.
Aw, give 'em a break. Microsoft Research probably spent $300 million to discover that some say tomatoes, some say tomatoes.
It does? Which is invoked when I just shut my Macbook Pro’s lid?
Read the rest of the thread. There is only one mode: The new Sleep is Safe by default. Safe Sleep is just an improved Sleep feature, not a separate function. It writes your data to drive, LIKE hibernation. UNLIKE hibernation, it doesn’t then proceed to turn off your computer, but rather sleeps normally until you run out of power.
So what’s the second mode HorseloverFat was talking about?