RE : sleep vs shut down

For 10 years I have been setting my laptops to go to sleep when closing the lids.
I did that because a) laptop went back to desktop a lot faster, and b) I was told years ago that "hard shut down" using the power butter was not "healthy" for the computer.

In any event, true or false, I would like to know ........
With the present-day computers, is there any ill effect if I use the power butter as a regular routine to shut down the computer instead of using sleep mode ?

Power button override (i.e. shutting down the system by holding down the power button for 4 seconds) should only be used if your system is hung and can't be shut down any other way. The main risk if you do this on a normally running system is data loss.

Power button soft shutdown via Windows has no practical impact to longevity compared to sleep.

If you go to sleep then you are burning some power to maintain RAM contents but you can start up exactly where you left off in a few seconds. Of course, this is at the risk of losing any unsaved data in case of power loss.

If you shutdown then it'll take much longer to start up and you'll have to reopen whatever apps/documents you were working on.

davidhk said:

For 10 years I have been setting my laptops to go to sleep when closing the lids.
I did that because a) laptop went back to desktop a lot faster, and b) I was told years ago that "hard shut down" using the power butter was not "healthy" for the computer...

It's only a 'hard shut down' if you press and hold the power button until the power dies and kills the OS while it's still running - useful only as a last resort if the system has hung (and yes, it's a bad thing to do regularly).

A quick press on the power button can be handled in software, set it in Control Panel > Power Options. Choices are: Do nothing, Sleep, Hibernate, Shut down, or Turn off display. A software shut down is safe because the OS shuts itself down properly before telling the power supply to turn off. A hard shut down turns off the power supply to kill an unruly OS.

Personally, since Windows '95 I have always set my laptops to hibernate when the lid is closed. It's a bit slower to resume than sleep, but unlike sleep requires no battery power to maintain it. I've even hibernated a PC and taken out the hard drive so I could test an install on another drive. When I put the original drive back it resumed from hibernation as if nothing had happened.

Thanks for all the replies.