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Laptop Use Query
06-12-2011, 07:27 PM
Quick question. My sisters just got my mother a small laptop as a birthday gift (an Acer AspireOne), but my mother only plans to use it when she's going to be away from her home for a few days (which only happens every few months), since she already has a desktop for home use. She was wondering if she should pull the battery when not in use (it can apparently slide right out without difficulty), or if she should just leave the thing in.
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I've got one of those and have a similar usage profile and I just leave it in. I assume she's worried about the battery discharging? I'm just checking now . . .
almost two months unused . . battery at 78%. I don't remember what it was to start with.
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Pulling the battery out of an AspireOne forces the notebook into unpowered mode - essentially crashing the system if it wasn't completely shut down first.
Just closing the lid puts the Acer into standby mode; it doesn't do a complete shutdown.
So, unless your mother likes losing data (including personal preference data), she'll have to remember to do a full shutdown every time she turns off the AspireOne... or she can just leave the battery in.
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I regard not turning off a computer when you're not using it as distinctly odd, especially one that runs on batteries.
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Well, in the case of desktops, ISTR hearing something about how it takes more power to completely reboot one than to "sleep mode" it.
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I don't know where you got that, Fox, but I've heard the same urban legend approximately ten bajillion times.
In actual fact, entering 'sleep mode' (note: not hibernate, that's different) takes more power than shutting down and rebooting does. Why? Because the system keeps drawing power to keep the contents of RAM alive. During shutdown, obviously, it doesn't. And starting up doesn't cost anything extra -- your hard drive is essentially drawing the same power whether it's been running for half an hour or if it's just starting up. The tradeoff between shutdown and sleep isn't power, it's speed -- sleep is almost instantaneous, shutdown-and-reboot is not.
Hibernation mode is slightly different, in that it's faster to start up from than shutdown but slower than sleep, and it has some of the advantages of both -- it uses no power at all, but the state of your computer is preserved. However, it has some issues -- not everything out there is truly compatible, and it often chokes on connected devices (which themselves aren't designed properly); when it works, it's great, but when it doesn't work you might as well have saved yourself the frustration and just shut down the first time.
TL;DR version: always shut down your computer if you're going to be away from it for more than thirty minutes or so; if less, sleep it. That'll give you the best balance of power saving vs. convenience.
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Tell her to just turn it off, leave the battery in.
The battery will slowly discharge but it can take a stupidly long time. I've got a netbook I use occasionally, and I've left it off and not-plugged for many weeks at a time and it still has some charge when I get around to it.
If she's really worried, off+plugged will trickle-charge the battery, keeping it constantly topped up and will only put minimal wear on it.
A more serious concern is updates. As part of her pre-travel preparation, tell her that when she's making sure the battery's charged, she also makes sure to run all the updates (Windows or otherwise) before traveling - and that includes (in Windows' case anyways) doing another boot/shutdown to make sure everything's okay.
And if she wants speedy access while travelling, she can boot it up, close the lid to sleep it, and she's fine. It should take many hours for the laptop to run down the battery on standby (usually 3-4hh for every 1h of normal runtime).
