Can a laptop be allowed to hibernate indefinitely?

[Felecha]

I run my laptop (HP Pavilion n5470) off to the side of my desk quite frequently, and it goes into hibernation at 15 minutes of non-use. When I want to wake it up I hit the button and it whirrrrs into action. Now that I'm at home for a stretch and not going off daily and taking it, I wonder -- it's surely convenient to just leave it asleep, and get it up and going in seconds instead of 2 minutes to boot. But, is there any long term problem with leaving it for days on end in hibernation mode?

 

[Shalmanese]

If its running on battery, Hibernate will drain the battery slightly faster than it being off so you may have problems after about 2 weeks with the battery being dead. If it is on mians power, then I would worry about leaving it constantly attached to mains. Its not good for the batteries to be hooked up to mains for too long so if your going to keep it constantly attached, take the battery out. Other than that, why not put it in standby instead of hibernate? It is even faster to come out of.

 

[Felecha]

OK, learning here.

I thought it was hibernating, but going into the Power Options (Windows 2000 Pro) it looks like it's in fact going into Standby, not in fact hibernating. The options are set to turn off monitor in 10 minutes, turn off hard disk in 15, standby in 20. the hibernation thing is on a different tab, I see, and looks like something else.

I'm really curious -- it's bad to keep it plugged in? The way I use it (at school, I'm out for the summer) I generally go to the library, so I can plug in there. Since I work for hours at a time, I don't want to use the battery. I only get about an hour and a half on the battery.

Taking it out all the time seems a pain. What's the technicals behind the idea?

 

[Derango]

Hibernate will not drain the battery power. Hibernate saves the contents of the main memory to the hard drive, then powers down the system. The system will be off, and the batteries will not be used. Now, sleep mode is different. Sleep mode powers down everything but the memory, keeping its contents so that you can resume where you left off relativly quickly. This puts a slight drain on the battery.

 

[Felecha]

OK, that's fairly clear.

What about the question of the effects of leaving the dear thing plugged in for long times, like all day or more?

Thanks

F

 

[Woodchuck2000]

It very much depends on the laptop. Most are fine plugged in all the time as they basically ignore the fact that there's a battery attatched if it's fully charged. Unless your laptop tries to charge the battery continually when plugged in, there are no side effects

 

[bwass24]

Modern laptops have very smart batteries and charging cirsuits. There's no problem leaving it plugged in as long as you need to.

 

[Felecha]

Thanks all

F

 

[VBboy]

Hibernation does drain the battery. It dumps memory content to disk and shuts down the laptop. You can do it with a desktop too, of course. It takes less time to come back from a hibernation than from a shut-down.

My laptop cannot come back from a hibernation, though It just sits there.

The Suspend To Ram (STR) does drain the battery. It is a form of "suspend" that is very efficient, but not all motherboards support it.

 

[VBboy]

Also, you can even take the hard drive out of the computer once it hibernated to it. You can keep it as backup Or you can make a copy of the hibernation file itself, but I don't know you'd want to

 

[Shalmanese]

Despite all the fancy "smart batteries" or, actually, because of it, the battery life gets gradually shortened if you leave it on mains. The extent of the shortening is not significant for most cases but if you leave a laptop plugged in to mains for about 3-6 months, then you start getting a pretty significant loss. Leaving it plugged in for a day will not do anything significant.

If you read your laptop manual VERY carefully, there will usually be something in the smallest of fonts saying take your battery out if your using it for any significant amout of time. Also, with standby, if your battery drains absolutely flat or if you take it out while not on mains, you will lose your work so just be careful with that.

 

[Felecha]

Okey dokey. That covers it pretty well I think

Thanks

F