What is the effect of always sleeping a laptop? Is it bad for batteries or something else? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
Is it bad to put your computer in sleep mode every time?

I do not shut down my laptop (os:vista). Instead I always make it sleep. Are there any bad consequences of this approach?

Solution 1:

Obviously, if your laptop is sleeping and you lose AC power (ie on a desktop computer) or the battery goes completely flat, your RAM cannot be refreshed and you lose all state. That's why hibernating is better if this would be a problem.

As for the effect on your battery, it depends entirely on the type of chemical composition used in the battery. eg Lithium-Ion and Nickel MEtal Hydride have different charging, usage and lifetime recommendations. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery

Solution 2:

Apart from the small amount of extra battery usage, no.

Solution 3:

If you forget that you have it on sleep instead of hibernate, and you for some reason take out the battery, then that could frag your hard drive and not play nice with the OS.

Solution 4:

I believe that using sleep/standby when not having the laptop plugged in is actually beneficial to battery life, supposing a lithium battery is used.

As explained in the wikipedia article, battery life is best kept at 40% charge. So not having your battery fully charged all the time should help.