Laptop on overnight

Won't do your battery a bit of good to leave it constantly charging - you should fully cycle it around once a month or so, running it until it is exhausted, then fully charging it. Other than that, as long as your laptop has plenty of ventilation and doesn't get too hot, leaving it on 24/7 shouldn't be a problem. About the only time I ever turn off a laptop - or any other computer, for that matter, is if I'm going to be poking around inside it. Setting the machine to go into Standby after a period of inactivity would save a bit of electricity, and a bit of wear-and-tear on the computer itself, letting it go into hibernate saves even more, though startup from hibernate will take noticeably longer than from either standby or full power off. Here at home, my laptops and desktops are are always on, and connected to my network, just set to shut down their displays after a certain period of inactivity. I don't even configure them for standby; when I want to use a machine, I want to use it NOW, not a minute or two from now, and if I want to access a file on or transfer a file to one of the machines on my network, I want to be able to do so when I want to, not after booting up an off-line machine. Besides that, I participate in a distributed computing project, and when I'm not using them, or poking around inside them, my machines are crunching numbers for the project.

To be honest about it, I'm not a particularly good record-keeper/file clerk; I'll know I've downloaded or stored something on one of my machines a while back, come up with a need for that thing, have no idea where it is, and have to search through the entire network to find it. Just lazy/sloppy really - there's no excuse for that, I'm always snagging stuff and storing it on the desktop of whichever machine I happen to be using at the moment. And if you think thats bad, you ought to see my collection of unlabled disks - really gotta do something about that one of these days. I really mean to.

Hey timberland, what brand are the laptops you own?

I want to do the same thing you do with your laptop but Im afraid mine cant handle it. Its a 6020gz Gateway I bought from Best Buy. Basically an 800 dollar entry level laptop.

the bottom of the laptop gets very hot, though probably normal, im assuming it cant be good for it.

what do you think?

Brand doesn't make much difference - I have an older, minor-brand laptop thta has worked like a champ for years, and I have a much newer big-name, high-end laptop, still in warranty, that is going back to the vendor for a 4th repair, this time to re-repair an earlier failure (none of which had anything to do with heat or time powered on). My machines are in a pretty environmentally stable, comfortable room, connected to a heavilly regulated, strongly filtered and surge-protected constant power supply. The room has 2 fair-sized aircleaners, the filters of which are carefully maintained, and diust is kept to a minimum in the room (though I am a smoker, and there are dogs all over the place). There is plenty of air circulation around all the machines, and the laptops sit on the work surface with their bottoms elevated a bit, not flat on the surface, in order to provide for better airflow. They do get hot, one, which has a regular desktop P4 processor, not a mobile processer, gets comparatively very hot (in normal use it would be uncomfortable to have directly in your lap, and if it is working hard, I really doubt you'd want it directly in your lap even if you were wearing bike leathers), but it has a good fan system, and I have its fan settings configured to "Always On". The room is a little noisy; lotsa fans going all the time, but I'm real used to it, and hardly notice it. There's usually a TV on or some music playing while I'm at my machines anyway, and the entertainment soundsystem is fairly respectable - Mrs T is always hollering at me to turn it down

Anyhow, the key is heat control and environmental stability, IMO - a good backup power supply/surge priotector, and plenty of freely moving, relatively dry, clean air, and you oughtta be just fine. If you're gonna leave the machine untended for any extended period of time, it'll be easier on its power supply if you stop and disconnect any USB or FireWire devices - if you use Stop/Disconnect Hardware to shut them down before disconnecting them, the machine should recognize and mount them as soon as you reconnect them to the machine.