How the sleep function works depends on the computer (mostly its age), the manufacturer and the operating system. First, with regards to the other questions you've posted:
1. Yes, it's harmfull to a computer to leave it running constantly, though this is purely a mechanical issue: a harddisk drive has a number of revolutions (of the disk) before it starts to fail. No need to worry though: the actual number could be in the millions, if not billions. Plus, most drives tend to end up with corrupted sectors (due to the number of read/write cycles) before the drive stops spinning. However, if you leave your computer running overnight, for say 8 hours, and your drive runs at 5.400 revolutions per minute, you can imagine the amount of wear you can save by turning your computer off at night (or at least, put it to sleep). The power supply fan suffers from the same wear, by the way, as it is also constanly running. 2. The sleep function on a Macintosh of that age is not unlike the PC's of the same age. When you select 'Sleep' from the Special menu, the computer shuts down power to harddisks and opticals, disables network activity and puts the display adapter to 'sleep'. However, due to the way Power Management was set up in those days, the power supply must keep running in sleep mode, because it didn't include circuitry that could 'wake' the computer (via keyboard or mouse) when the power supply was essentially 'switched off'. And if your power supply had a fixed/physical switch (Compact Macs, LC-series), there was no way to power down the supply even if technology existed to do so. Your computer does, however, draw much less power when set to sleep mode. You're also saving wear on the harddisk. But, might I ask, why not shut it down? Unless you're running it as a server of some kind, of course! Greetings, Eelco. -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
