W3J hibernation (yet again)

Gidday guys.

I know this problem has been rehashed in several forms here, but I have yet to see a definitive answer. First off though, what is the difference between "sleep" and "hibernation"?

Anyway, while plugged into Mains, I left my computer on last night, got up this morning and lo and behold, I couldn't wake the wee beastie up. Had to turn it off and on again. No combination of keys would wake it up. I have read a few times to go into power configurations and disable hibernation, but does this mean I have to change each power setting in Power4Gear mode? I have the impression from previous threads that people are only disabling it in "battery-saving mode", which to me seems odd, as it is obviously happening on mains supply too.
I am running BIOS 210 if that makes any difference

Last but not least, anybody heard any reports on the new Hitachi 160G perpendicular drives? Supposed to be better power-wise than the Seagates??


Thanks and regards to all.

 

The difference between sleep mode and hibernation is that in sleep mode the computer just stores everything in the RAM, the computer rquires power, and if the power is interrupted, the computer will lose everything. Storing everything to RAM means that the computer can turn back on in several seconds, just like it was. This is bad news for laptops which can drain batterys, or worse, turn on in a bag if something goes wrong. Hibernation stores everything to the hard drive. It doesn't require power, so there is no risk of losing information, but if there are hardware changes (USB devices, things like that) those can cause some problems with hibernation (most don't). I personally use hibernation when I transport my comptuer, or anytime I am going to power down. If it is just inactive on my desk, it will go to sleep mode (standby).

As far as the power issue, there is some discussion about the screen not turning back on on many Asus notebooks. If you have the comptuer set to show the welcome screen after a screensaver or resume from standby, those can cause problems. If you would like, I post further instructions on that. Also, you should do some searching for the threads about the screen not turning back on after the computer goes into hibernation. If you disable hibernation, then you don't need to worry about Power4Gear, it will only go into sleep mode.

For the hard drive, I haven't heard about the Hitachi version, they are better power wise because they are faster at reading and writing information, which means that they complete tasks faster and can spin back down, so they don't require power, I don't know if they are faster than the Seagate 160GB drives. Good luck, and if you have any questions about this or anything else, fell free to ask.

 

Newly owner of Asus lappy with said problem, please provide fix if you don't mind. thanks.

 

This might be a solution.

~ Brett