I’m sure this question has been asked before. That said, is there any drawback to leaving your computer in sleep mode overnight vs. shutting it down? What about for more extended periods?
I thought that some programs aren’t very good at “releasing” RAM when turned off and that shutting down was the best way to insure this happens.
Sleep vs. shutdown will depend a lot on your specific circumstances. These days, with energy-star everything, I wouldn’t worry about the power difference much for a few-hour or overnight gap: longer than that and it makes sense to shut down for power conservation.
As for the above, you don’t tell us your Operating System, but on both Macs and PCs, the OS reclaims the memory from apps when they shut down, and you as long as you quit the app from time to time you won’t lose memory. (The Mac doesn’t actually “release” all that memory until it’s needed, since it makes it faster to re-load the app if it wants to, but that’s a feature, not a bug). Over very, very long periods, you might see the OS itself leak or fragment memory, but a shutdown once or twice a month would be enough for that even in the rare case where it matters at all.
In the business world, people run “servers,” sometimes with the consumer OSes on them, for months or years without shutdown and without running out of RAM.
I concur with everything said here. Windows 7 and Vista also tend to hold on (and sometimes even pre-load) your memory with programs you aren’t using, this makes loading them faster. Its by design.
I regularly leave my desktop on for the whole month. It usually gets rebooted when the monthly Microsoft patches come out.
Sleep should be just fine.
what Hermitian said. For me, sleep mode on Vista and 7 is so much more reliable than it was on XP that I really only reboot for patch Tuesday. I just prefer the fact that the system gets up and running in seconds when I need it, instead of minutes. It will, of course, use more power in standby mode (I think several watts to keep the memory refreshed) so if that’s still a concern there’s always hibernate mode.
Windows and *nix do this too. The memory pages of a closed application are marked as “free” but they’re not purged or anything until something else has to use it. That way, if you decide to re-open the app, it can just use what’s still in RAM. Otherwise, it costs no time at all for the OS to just load something else in there if that RAM is needed.