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Why I Never Put My Windows PC to Sleep
We often drop the lid on our laptops and walk away, but have you ever thought about what randomly putting your Windows PC to sleep does? Frequently using sleep might be doing more harm than good, and that's why I never put my PC to sleep.
Modern PCs Boot Pretty Quickly
One of the main benefits of putting your PC to sleep is that it's instantly ready to go when you press the power button, raise the lid, press a key, or move your mouse. However, with most, if not all, modern PCs coming with SSDs, it only takes about 10 seconds or so for a PC to boot up from total shutdown.
SSDs are the real champions here. Durability and power efficiency benefits aside, they have a significantly faster data transfer rate compared to HDDs. This makes them one of the best upgrades you can make to an old PC. Even slower SATA SSDs will significantly improve your boot times, so you don't necessarily have to shell out for top-of-the-line offerings either.
Additionally, the Fast Startup feature on Windows can further speed up boot times. You also have the option to hibernate your PC, something I use often instead of sleep. When you look at all the other problems related to putting your Windows PC to sleep, saving 10 seconds waiting for your PC to wake up doesn't seem that big of an advantage.
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unbranded - LifestyleUsing Sleep Often Can Degrade System Performance
If you're putting your PC to sleep often, you're likely degrading your system's performance one session at a time. While your hardware stays relatively unaffected, using sleep back-to-back on a Windows machine recreates all the implications of never rebooting your Windows PC.
Over time, you'll end up with software issues, slowdowns as your system's memory fills up, and perhaps most crucially, issues with Windows updates that require system restarts. This is why shutting your PC daily is a good idea as it cleans up system memory, closes stuck background processes, and clears out anything in the background that might be hogging system resources.
Your Battery Will Drain
Windows Modern Standby is an abomination, to say the least. While in sleep mode, your PC still consumes power. This may not be an issue for desktops, but on laptops, it means you're out of charge if you leave your device in sleep mode for too long. I've been in multiple situations where I left my house with a fully charged laptop in my backpack, but by the time I got to my destination, half the battery had been used up.
Why does a device in sleep mode require battery power? Well, sleep in Windows uses battery power to retain data in memory, which means it'll always drain some battery. Depending on the size and age of your laptop's battery, this could mean sleep might not be an option for you at all if your laptop is unplugged during the power state.
Sleep Might Interrupt System Processes
Unlike shutdown, which waits for processes to end properly before turning off the system, sleep saves everything to the system memory to resume whenever you're ready. This behavior doesn't play well with every program you use.
It can lead to corrupt files, settings, and game or app crashes. If you're using programs like Premiere Pro or AutoCAD, putting your Windows PC to sleep without properly closing them first is a one-way ticket to a corrupted project, in my opinion.
Modern hardware and software are far too well-designed for this to be a problem in the short term, but the situation gets worse as you frequently keep using sleep on your PC without shutting it down or rebooting it in between.
Hardware Strain and Inconsistent Behavior
While putting your PC to sleep won't really damage your hardware, it will strain it. I found that my laptop ran consistently hotter when sleeping than it did when I was shutting down or hibernating it. If you're carrying your laptop around inside a sleeve and backpack, that's never a good thing.
Additionally, your battery is constantly active and losing charge cycles, which could lead to battery life degradation in the long term. Your system memory is also active, and while that won't necessarily damage it, it's not good for any software running on your system.
This will eventually lead to inconsistent behavior such as irregular battery drain, performance issues, crashes, and more. Usually, a reboot will fix most of these issues, but opening a glitchy laptop in class is way worse than waiting 10 seconds for it to properly boot up.
Sleep is supposed to be a handy feature, but the current Windows implementation is quite disappointing. It's fine if you're doing it in short bursts occasionally, but using sleep on your Windows PC every day isn't a habit you should pick up.