Does Standby hurt your computer?

[Godly Paladin]

I'm on WinXP, and I'm finding myself putting my computer to standby/bringing it out 20-30 times a day. Am I killing my laptop through excess wear and tear or is it not a problem?

[Fish and Chips]

I've been doing that for a couple months now, and it doesn't seem to have caused any problems. But if my computer explodes over the next couple of weeks, I assure you, you'll be the first to know.

[Kaligraphic]

I think the fact thay you are keeping it in a tub of water is likely to be more damaging.

Short answer, though, is probably not. Standby itself is usually fine, but, sheesh, 20-30 times a day? You're probably putting it in standby when you don't need to.

[ShiroiHikari]

I hibernate my lappy, which is different, but standby shouldn't hurt as far as I know. I'd leave mine running more often, but...I've got a P4 under the hood and very insufficient cooling. -_-

[Etoh*the*Greato]

Turning the computer on and off is more harmful, and it's not even that harmful at all. Still, my lappy gets turned off maybe two or three times a month. *shrug* No damage here.

[LorentzForce]

Answer: No.

[Godly Paladin]

Thing is, I've disabled all the power regulation for the sake of performance, so I usually manually force the standby to conserve power.

Anyhoo, thanks for allaying my conscience, everyone.

[termyt]

The only thing I would be concerned about is sending 20-30 power spikes to your hard drive every day. Electrical components ony tend to fail when they are switched on. I would only set the computer to stand by if you are going to be away from it for more than a half-hour to an hour.

[Mithrandir]

Uh... Modern HDs, *especially* ones designed for laptops are engineered for precisely that - going on and off a lot; it's how the computer handles "power management" for the most part. If it kills the drive - it was a defective drive.


YMMV

[termyt]

Ooo, I love it when you talk down to me. Fair enough, I'm sure have more experience with computers than I do.

I would say 20-30 times a day definitely pushes the "going on and off a lot" design spec. In my office, hard drive failures on our laptops are fairly common - in that at least 4 hard drives have failed in the last five years. We had one fail on desktops in the five years prior using the "ancient" technology.

All of those hard drives were replaced under warranty, so the “defectiveâ€

[Mithrandir]

Well, hard disks, fans and CD drives are pretty much the only moving parts in your modern laptop - and moving parts are what suck the most juice. To help make the battery life last longer, the components used in mobile devices actually have their power shut completely off. That's all I was talking about.

I'm sorry if it sounded like I was "talking down" to you. I wasn't really intending too. As for your points on commodity hardware - you are precisely correct. It's not a question of *if* a HD will fail - it's a question of whether the OS will crap out first. For this reason, all the desktop machines I have use mirrored hard drives and either Linux or MacOS. That's about the only way I can get a good 5-10 years out of a box without having to waste my time re-installing the OS (and apps, etc).

[termyt]

I know you weren't trying to, and I took no offense, but I wanted to point out that when you start a paragraph with "um," you are indicating that the person before you just said something foolish or so completely wrong that you now must take a second to pause and collect your thoughts before you can respond to such a silly, obviously false notion.

An example of how the simple addition of "um" changes an excellent counter-point to an idea into an indictment against the one who brought the idea forth.

As I said, I took no offense, and hesitated to even bring it up, and now, I pray you take no offense from my correction.

[Mithrandir]

I have taken such offense that I can only be satisfied with a fight to the death. Or a box of pocky.

Wait... I have a box of pocky right here.

Mmmmm......

What was I saying?