Question about a laptop in bag

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

I have a friend who brings his laptop to school every few days. At school, he sets his laptop on Stand By and stuffs it in his bag. I keep telling him leaving it on Stand by all day, concealed in his bag is bad for the laptop and may damage it. Is that right?

[Computer Hope Admin]

Is it going into standby or into hibernate? Either way I don't think it would be bad on the laptop, although I would suggest him going into hibernation as apposed to standby.

I've worked on and know several others who have worked on laptops and have simply closed the laptop screen to have it go into hibernation and have used the laptops for years with no abnormal affects. However, I'm not aware of any studies about the topic.

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Thanks for replying really quickly, but won't the computer get to hot if it's spent the whole day in that bag?

[Computer Hope Admin]

When going into hibernate it's almost as your computer does turn off so no fans or other components are going and it wont heat up because nothing is running. Basically the computer puts all running applications and programs into a section of the hard disk drive and then powers everything down, when resuming it simply restores everything from the hard drive that was active back into the system memory to allow you to continue working.

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Thats kinda cool, lol.
I guess it's ok then.....and I assume because of what you said, it isn't going to run out of power easily.

[Computer Hope Admin]

Nope.

[Calum]

Hibernating uses almost no power, and no fans are running as it is basically turned off.
So it will not get hot.
Standby may still produce a little heat as it is not powered down as far as in hibernation, and it will use the battery more.
I find that after resuming from either of these states, my laptop is very slow to respond to anything, slower if in standby than hibernation,
That may just be an isolated issue though.
And I have heard that hibernation can damage some files on your hard drive, although I'm not sure how much truth there is in that so don't take that as fact.

[soybean]

Indeed, hibernation uses no power, i.e. no more power than when in full shutdown mode.  If you care to test this, put your computer into Hibernation and then pull the plug.  Plug it back in and turn it on; it will come out of Hibernation, same as if you had not pulled the plug.

[Zylstra]

Some laptops have a standby feature that is more like the Suspend feature.
Everything is shut down, except for the fans and the RAM and CMOS.
Once it cools, the fans turn off
but the RAM and CMOS continue to recive power, for an almost instant recovery.

It is reccomended that you use Hibernate over Standby for two reasons:
Hibernate doesen ware your battery, and if its the old type of Standby, it will not overheat.

Hibernate takes all the contents of the RAM, and saves it to the disk. There are only two downsides:
You dont get an instant restart from your computer
You need a hard drive with as much free space as the amount of RAM you have.
(eg: You have 4GB ram in a laptop, you need at least 4GB free on your disk, but you probably have well over that if your laptop has 4GB of RAM in the first place )

[Raptor]

Unless the laptop is faulty be design (IE: loose parts) it shouldn't damage it. But leaving it running probably isn't a good thing considering the heat build-up and the HDD that be in use.