Suspend the PC for a long time, does it damage its components?

It is very common, especially among laptop users, let the equipment go into a suspended state (It does by default when you close the laptop's lid, for example) instead of turning it off. In doing so, when we return to reactivate the equipment The process is much faster than letting it start again, and we will also find everything we had left open as we had it, so it is very comfortable.

The problem lies when we leave the equipment in a state called "deep suspension", that is, for a very long time.

Is it better to turn off or suspend the PC?

When we give Suspend PC or let it go into this state, the hardware of the equipment goes into what is called "Sleep mode", a mode that partially shuts down the hardware (for example, hard drives and SSDs go into mode DEV_SLEEP and the power supply enters S3 mode).

On the contrary, the definition of the S3 mode means «Suspend-to-RAM", which means that RAM remains fully active because, being a volatile memory, if we turned it off, the data it contains would be lost and in that case we could not reactivate the PC as we had it.

As a general rule nothing happens By doing this, everything will work smoothly and no component will be damaged. However, according to Intel, it can have some consequencesAt least if we do it for extended periods of time:

«If we leave the PC in sleep mode for a long time without turning it off, the memory may not be restored correctly. It could cause excessive memory redundancies and decrease its operating speed or cause errors (BSOD) when returning to normal after suspending the PC. It is best that, at the very least, the PC be restarted or shut down every 2-3 days ».

In short, it is best to turn off the PC If we are not going to use it for a long time, to avoid not only the wear of the components – especially the RAM – but also slowdowns in the equipment and possible failures such as blue screens. In any case, it is not at all dangerous for the team to leave it in suspension, although it is true that as Intel indicates it can have consequences that, in reality, are no more serious beyond losing the unsaved work that we could have at the moment in which the equipment enters a state of suspension.

Now, absolutely nothing happens to suspend the PC when we talk about shorter spaces of time and, in any case, we must remember that the team always feels good a restart from time to time.