What is your favorite default app? Which do you use most?

[mikeytg]

Just a quick question here, @mikeytg is it completely safe to always sleep your computer instead of rebooting it for months? I mean I never thought about it really. Doesn't doing that have any downsides? Kinda feels a bit awkward to me, but I can get used to it if it is technically safe to do so.

Thanks

In practice I reboot about once a month for various reasons, from updating software to "seems like a good idea". For the most part it is safe to use sleep as long as your OS and applications (mainly the browser for me) are solid enough to take it. Older versions of windows were rife with memory leaks and other programming deficiencies that would make them eventually crash or slow down to a crawl. I have found that Windows 8.1 and Chrome can run continuously without these kinds of failures.

There are still some caveats to doing this. One I know of is in Google Chrome. It is not capable of updating itself unless it is closed and reopened (a reasonable requirement!). If an update is available to Chrome but it has been running continuously, the only indication you'll see is that the three-line menu marker on the toolbar will turn red. Most windows updates, on the other hand, will happen as it is running and it will tell you if it needs a restart.

There is also a security consequence to leaving the PC in sleep mode. Even with full disk encryption your full running system remains in RAM when the computer is sleeping. It is theoretically possible if someone (NSA?) stole the PC that they could access this RAM and get the downlow on your most secure info like passwords and encryption keys. I am willing to take this risk when my PC is home, when I travel I shut it down.

I'm sure others here have differing opinions on this, the above are mine alone!

 

[CountMike]

For laptops, it makes more sense to use Sleep Mode because of battery. My PCs (Desktop) never get shut down for long time except when I go out of town for few days or need to upgrade or test something. Internet is always active and so are few sites open on one monitor an TV running on other one, day and night, 24/7.
For people using automatic windows maintenance should leave it running overnight at least once a week so it can do the job it's supposed to do. If you want you can schedule it for that time.

 

[Arpan]

Thanks for the explanation mikeytg! I usually use hibernate a lot more than I use sleep.