To Sleep or not to Sleep ?

Hi. I recently acquired an Acer Aspire 5003 and wanted to ask a question about power management. I've never had a lap-top before so this is a new experience for me. I wanted to know if my modus operandi is not a problem for keeping the life-span of my battery. What I usually do is put my computer on Standby or Sleep by doing an <F>+<F4>. I this analogous to turning the machine off or is the battery still used when in sleep mode ?

Thank you

 

The battery will experience a very slow drain in sleep mode to power certain LED lights that remain on and provide power to certain components (your system state is saved to memory in sleep mode and that takes a certain amount of power). Put your notebook in hibernate to save more battery life, system state is saved to hard disk and essentially power drain is zero. It takes longer to recover from hibernate though so if you're just turning the computer off for a little while the sleep/stand-by is better.

 

Standby is basically putting your computer into a low power mode. It suspends everything but keeps it in memory, so it's still on, but it's not doing anything.

Hibernate saves all the state information to the hard drive, and then really does shut down. The computer is completely off. When you restart it pulls all that information back up from the hard drive instead of starting normally.