Shutting down and restarting laptop

You can let the Power Options do a lot of the work for you.

I like to be able to walk away and not worry about coming back to save any work I've left open, yet know that the computer will save it itself while going to sleep in 30 minutes, and then after an hour or so write it to the HD so it can Shutdown.

Yet when I return - hours or weeks later - the startup is much faster when Resuming and my work is intact and waiting where I left it.

The price you pay for having this hands-free ability to walk away whenever and for as long as you want is that you need to do a restart every day or so. However waiting until you have Updates which prompt for Restart is probably enough.

I like to have my laptop Hibernate when I close the lid, so it starts up faster and I can leave work out to continue what I was doing at the beach or in another room.

sometimes depends on the spec of the machine also i find; some of the low power netbooks never do actually hibernate -- they need to be turned OFF. i've even played with the power options; maybe it was the netbooks at fault ?

but yes, hibernate feature i tend to use too; use the power settings as said; e.g shut down lid enables hibernation etc.

My netbook has Hibernate, I had to change it through settings so I didn't have to press Power to resume it, instead just move the mouse or type a letter and instantly. I just Shut Down my PC.

Thanks guys

I had a laptop for a year, only shut it down if it needed an update or I was going on a plane, so only around every 2-3 weeks did it get shut down.
Never had a reduce in performance, or other issue with it.

I would put it to sleep whenever I wasn't using it though, but there were a lot of nights I'd leave it on while it was downloading something.

So did it die after a year ?

Haha, no. I gave that to my mum because she bought me a new one.
It had no designated graphics card, 320GB HDD, and 4GB RAM.
New one has 1.5TB HDD, 8GB RAM, and 1.5GB graphics.