Laptop Users: Close the Cover

I'm guilty of leaving my notebook PC running endlessly. Perhaps you are too. I've had I've had two separate hard disk crashes this year on two separate notebook PCs. And my husband's small company just had a drive failure on a laptop, too. All of the laptops in question were between two and three years old.
The bottom line seems to be that after two or three years, hard disk failure in laptops is pretty common, at least based on my small sample.

So here's what I'd strongly recommend for all laptop users. Close the cover of your machine when you're not using it. This will put it into hibernate, sleep, or shutdown mode depending on how you've set up those options on your PC. Closing the cover stops the disk from spinning constantly. Even heavy laptop users probably only use their machines 30-50 hours a week. But there are 168 hours in a week, so if your PC is shut and the hard drive is not spinning when not in use, you should see at least three times the lifetime from your hard disk. Over time that could be the difference between failure after three years and failure after nine years!

Think my math is overly optimistic? Let me know if you've seen the same type of failures and successes. Seems like a big payoff for doing something as simple as closing the cover, doesn't it?

For more:

On the various options on turning off your PC.

On conserving laptop power.