Go on sleep or shut it down?? what is the best?

Question

Hi, I use my powerbook everyday and I wonder whether I should let it go on sleep during the night and switch it off once a week, or properly shut it down everyday... What do you thing is the best for the computer? thx

Answer 1

There is no right or wrong answer for this one. There is the perspective on how to best optimize the battery:
http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html
There is the logfile cleanup which happen at night which definitely won't happen if you are shut down. But I have been off for more than a week on a current Powerbook and it hasn't made a difference not having run the logfile cleanup. Though I used to worry about it not running when the machine is asleep as opposed to being in screen saver, though thanks to some kind souls I've learned that this is not as big a concern as I had originally thought.
And then Unix is itself designed to run well as a system that is always on.
Then of course there is the perspective that every time you power up the machine, you are giving it a surge of power that it wouldn't have if it was just simply steadily running. That's true of any type computer including laptops. Whether this makes it age more or less, is anyone's guess because we don't know how the machine was designed.
So use whatever habit suits you best, and periodically if necessary optimize your battery.