Sleep or Off?

[Nikko G]

I know this question has been asked many times, but I cant seem to find a direct answer. So my question is should I keep my pc on sleep or off? I tend to use it for around 5-6 hours on the weekdays and 10 hours on the weekends. I keep my pc off for about 18 hours. I am looking to keep my components with less stress as possible and I heard turning it on and off frequently can cause more damage than keeping it on sleep, but then some argue that keeping it on sleep builds dust but my pc's fans stop spinning when my pc is on sleep. Which one is best for me?

 

[Solandri]

Off = all components turned off. No battery drain (though batteries lose a little bit of charge each day just sitting on the shelf).

Hibernate = contents of memory written to disk, all components turned off. I recommend disabling this if you have a SSD, as often it takes longer to wake from hibernate than to just boot up on a SSD. I've also found it a bit flaky in Win 8.x, so usually just disable it anyway.

Sleep/Suspend = CPU and memory kept powered on (in a low power state), everything else turned off. Your battery will slowly drain in this state.

There's very little difference in terms of component wear. The main reason to use Sleep is if your computer takes a long time to boot, or if you like to pick off right where you left off with your browser, apps, and windows already open and in just the right place. The main reason to turn it off is if you absolutely must have every drop of battery life when you turn the laptop on.

For a desktop, i usually recommend turning it off at night. A power failure when the desktop is in Sleep acts like a crash - the computer will have to scan for and recover damaged files. In very rare cases this can cause the computer to fail to boot, which is a major headache I'd rather not visit my friend's house to fix. A power failure when the desktop is off has no consequences.

 

[royalcrown]

I think the big component wear worries are outdated and from a time when a lot of people used HDDs. If the computer is running 8.x or 10 and the power goes off when asleep it's nowhere near as bad as windows 7 on down. it'll usually just fix itself.