Keeping laptop on sleep mode...FOREVER

[wootwoot]

My lappy is about 8 months old, a $650 ACER Aspire 5535G, I think.

I've been somewhat addicted to using sleep mode as a daily alternative to shutting down my computer, because it allows me to immediately start up whenever I want.

Is this a bad habit? Should I be shutting down the computer after every session? I ask this because recently, I've been experiencing ~10-20% more lag while playing my favorite games, all of which ran completely lag-free up until January-ish.

I do a biweekly defrag, and I use CCleaner at least once a week. I get Hijacklog check-ups regularly, and I'm sure my computer is clean. I run Vista on the weakest graphical settings to boost performance, so my gaming experience becomes a bit better.

Any help?

 

[MindoverMaster]

You want to turn it off one night a week, let it relax. Same with desktops. Otherwise, the memory gets filled up, trying to remember all that data while sleeping multiple times.

 

[Overbear]

I personally would advise against use of sleep mode at all. There has never been a real good workup of it by Microsoft, and it tends to be buggy at best.

The better option is to use hibernate mode, and then as Mindovermaster said, do a full shutdown once a week.

 

[Lexluethar]

You should be fine. Shut it down once a week to allow the memory to be freed up, otherwise as the week progresses you may start receiving memory errors because the system is losing track of where data is written to.

I use hibernation on a daily basis and shutdown probably once every two weeks. If you can, use hibernation. It takes a few more seconds to wake up from it, but it is a better alternative to sleep because it writes the information stored in memory to hard disk so you aren't using battery life keeping memory charged (as when memory loses charge you lose the data).

This publication by microsoft will help:
Sustainable Computing: Sleep or Hibernate?