Hello, I have a question about shutting down my computer. While I'm at home, I shut down my computer in the evening, because I know I won't be using it for a long time, specifically until I return home from work the next evening. However, while I'm at university and taking classes, I leave it in sleep mode overnight, as I use it the next morning, and I also put it to sleep while I am in class. Is that the correct course of action to do the least amount of wear-and-tear damage to my hardware? It's a laptop, if that matters. Thank you.

I always put my laptop to sleep.

If your battery is decent, unplug it some nights, otherwise either leave it plugged in, or do a full power off. Or use hibernate mode. (if you have Windows XP and up, only problem is that if you have 1GB of ram, you need to give up 1GB of HDD space so you can hibernate.)

I hope that helped, but TAALH. (typed at a late hour)

I understand modern hard drives no longer suffer as much from spin-up, and spin-down wear-n-tear, which is why a lot of newer EHDs have pretty eager auto-shut-off modes. A critical factor in determining hard drive life is heat on the other hand, a factor shared by CPUs, RAM, and other chips. So shutting off power to those components, whether by Shutting down completely or using S3(STR) stand-by is probably the best bet for reducing the heat.