What is the effect of always sleeping a laptop? Is it bad for batteries or something else? [duplicate]

"Obviously, if your laptop is sleeping and you lose AC power (ie on a desktop computer) or the battery goes completely flat, your RAM cannot be refreshed and you lose all state. That's why hibernating is better if this would be a problem.

As for the effect on your battery, it depends entirely on the type of chemical composition used in the battery. eg Lithium-Ion and Nickel MEtal Hydride have different charging, usage and lifetime recommendations. See: http://en.wikipediadotorg/wiki/Rechargeable_battery"

If you forget that you have it on sleep instead of hibernate, and you for some reason take out the battery, then that could frag your hard drive and not play nice with the OS.

"Is there a good reason to not Hibernate?
It saves battery and does not need power connected.
But, you do need a hibernation space as large as your RAM -- is that your problem?"

In years and years of experimenting with audio apps on both Windows XP and OSX, I can assure you that no system wakes up from "sleep" mode with all of its marbles in place. If you're just browsing the web, sleep mode is fine, but I prefer to either keep the computer running (which I do, generally, 365 days a year) or shut it down completely.