hi guys,

my girlfriend said that i should never turn off my ibook, and instead i should just let it sleep when not using it. is this right?

how much power does the ibook consume when sleeping?

The iBook will not consume much power whilst asleep.

Unplugged, my iBook when exactly 7 days before I used it once, when I went up North on a trip and had no power source. And I still have 60% battery life. This was only done to see how long in actual fact the battery would go for in sleep mode. I would safely assume over 10 days.

I find that the only time it would be good to put into sleep mode (shutting the lid or whatever) is when you know you are going to be using it again in 5-60mins.

Otherwise, I would turn it off anyway.

pipsqeek

I leave my iBook in sleep mode overnight, it sleeps when I do. But I'm beginning to think I really should make a habit of shutting it down every couple of days.

I've run Apple hardware for years just putting it into sleep mode. The benefit is, when you power the machine up again, you can continue where you left off previously. There is no harm in doing this for long periods of time, as my wife's iceBook will show, running this way for 97 days without a reboot.

I keep my machines up to date so the only time I usually reboot an OS X machines is when an update requires it, which seems often enough.

The only other time I'll shut it down is if I now I'm not going to be using it for a day or more.

Yep, I leave my iBook in sleep mode all the time.

Currently 28 days uptime. I log out then back in every now and then, but that's pretty much it.

No problems at all.

Gelfie

Hmm I think the times that I do restart my iBook are when the damn thing hangs for lack of RAM.

Time for more RAM it sounds like then

The only thing I find that is inconvenient by 'sleeping' is after doing so my powerbook looses the wireless connection and I woulnt be able to connect back both manually or automatically. But it's fine after a reboot, anyone else experience that problem?

Much as I'd love to bung in a new 512, there's an ickle problem concerning money - poor student that I am, I don't have any! <_<

Nope. My 12" keeps the wireless network connection fine.

Sometimes i've noticed my powerbook have some 'bad nights sleep' whereby it'll wake up, then because it's closed, go back to sleep, then wake up again - can do this several times in a row

Thomas

yeah mine retains the connection too

This is something that bugged me - my wife's iBook would complain about failing to connect to the airport network on wake, but a second try would work. It doesn't do this any longer, but I'd really love to know what causes this problem. I suspect it's prefs that need resetting - I vaguely suspect that a previous airport setup was bieng tried first, causing the failure.

z3[n], mine also has this problem. If I am at home on our home WiFi, and put my pBook to sleep, it will not automatically join the network when I wake it up. Its just annoying having to go and select it from the little airport menu.

Otherwise, I always put it to sleep. Its especially useful to put to sleep in the middle of a "homeworld 2" level, as you cant save halfway through, and often I need to jump of a train/go to lecture, so its a big help being able to put it to sleep, then simply resume playing 2 hours later.