Hibernate v. Sleep v. ShutDown

I know I've seen a thread but cant seem to find it:

What are the pro vs. cons of hibernate/sleep/shut-down?

 

Well sleep starts things up again the fastest and doesn't affect the harddrive.
Hibernate is slower than sleep, but uses less battery life also.
Shut down is a total start up and wears down the harddrive from prolonged use of on and off.

Here's one
Here's another

 

Quick correction, but hibernate shuts it down completely and DOES NOT use battery power. It's like using a "save state" in uh ROMs, your computer will be at the same point you shut down at.

Sleep also uses a small amount of battery life.

 

suppose i want to start downloads at 2 am in night and i have scheduled my download managers for same and then as i understand sleep mode is combo of standby.so will my laptop start download at 2 am with resume from sleep mode
?

 

Sleep in Vista uses much less battery life than Stand By in XP. One of my friends can drain his battery by leaving his computer in Stand By for a while, but I can leave mine in Sleep all day and have full charge.

 

Perhaps i'm weird but I just like to start with a "fresh slate".

 

Thanx guys! +Rep to 1st reply

 

Sleep - turns drives and display off, and puts cpu and memory in a low powered state, only enough to keep the data in RAM alive. Less wear and tear, fastest wake up time, but does use power and keeps the electronics "active", could have problems long down the road.

Hybernate - snapshots the RAM and saves it to the HD in a single file, then completely shuts down. Bootup is a little longer, and windows thinks it just came out of sleep mode. You can (and if there are problems loading the snapshot, may be prompted to) opt to actually start windows fresh, losing any unsaved work at this point too. Hybernate takes no power when the computer is off.

This is what I use all the time. I'm rarly playing games which may upset windows, so stability is never a problem.

Shut down - Standard, windows closes all programs.. and has to reload all drivers and programs when you start backup so it is obviously the slowest. Can cause wear and tear, annoyance if you go to your laptop many times a day.

Pratik, programs don't get cpu time when in sleep, so programs cant calculate anything and in turn, can't tell windows to get out of sleep mode. Some laptops have a wake up clock in Bios, try looking there.

 

I'm the same way - I've noticed problems with both Vista and XP when sleeping/resuming multiple times, so I like to restart after every few sleep/resume cycles.

I like the way OS X and Macs handle sleeping.

 

when you go into sleep mode, is the computer still running (you can hear the fan or hard drive running)?

I go into sleep mode and you can still hear something running. I though sleep mode is meant to be like stand by in XP

 

^^

Same, on mine the screen turns black but I can still hear the fan. I hit a key or move the mouse and the screen lights up again.

 

It's not like that on mine.....maybe I have hybrid sleep turned on, but I think it's just plain sleep. I have to hit the power button to wake it up. Nothing running...

\\edit

But the power light fades on and off, unlike Hibernate.

 

If I'm transporting the laptop to and from campus, do I want to keep the laptop in hibernate/shutdown mode to reduce damage to the hard drive? Or is jostling the hard drive while it is in an "on" state (like with sleep) not an issue?

 

There seem to be a few misunderstandings re Sleep, Hybrid Sleep, Hibernate and Shutdown here so here is my attempt

Sleep is just like Standby in XP. The machine shuts down the CPU, HDD, Display and fans etc. Basically it just keeps the memory running so that the current state of the machine is maintained. This allows a quick wake-up to normal usage as the machine can just turn everything back on again. This will use some power. E.g, on my M1530, the battery will drop 10% per 1/1.5 hours (shouldn't be that fast but it is).

Hibernate writes the memory contents to the hard disc and shuts the machine down. Therefore, Hibernate uses no power. When you turn the machine back on again, it will load the saved memory contents from the hard disc back into memory and everything will resume from where you left it. There is one key problem with Hibernate... if the hardware of the machine changes while it is hibernated, the machine can't resume.

Hybrid Sleep is a mixture of sleep and hibernate. The machine will write the current memory state to the hard disc and then go to regular sleep. This means that if power is lost, the machine can still resume from the memory state saved to the hard disc. Therefore, as it is still essentially sleeping, it uses the same amount of power as regular sleep (maybe slightly more as it has to write the memory to the hard disc first).

Shutdown does just that, it shuts down windows and the PC. All memory state is lost and the pc is turned off.

So, Hybrid Sleep and regular Sleep both use some power to maintain the memory state. I'm told that Vista can resume from Sleep more quickly then Hybrid Sleep (don't know why).

If you had to rank the 4 modes in terms of resume time, they'd be (fastest to slowest):
Sleep, Hybrid Sleep, Hibernate, Shutdown/turn on.

If you had to rank the 4 modes in terms of battery usage they'd be (lowest to highest):
Shutdown, Hibernate, Sleep, Hybrid Sleep (NOTE: this is because it would use some power to write the memory state to hard disc before sleeping).

You can tell if the machine is asleep, running for hibernated/shutdown by looking at the power light. If the light is on solid, the machine is running. If the light is slowly flashing it is sleeping (note, on the M1530, the flash is very slow). if the light is off then the machine is off!

Does that clarify it for everyone?

 

In answer to your question specifically, it doesn't matter whether it is shutdown, hibernated or sleeping/hybrid sleeping as all 4 modes have the hard disc spun down.

 

That sounds like Windows turning off the display, that isn't sleep, hibernate or anything!

From memory, all the default power profiles will turn off the display after a while (times vary between profiles though).

 

In all three of your scenarios, the harddrive is spun down so there is no difference in harddrive wear between the three.

 

whats different in OS X?

 

I click on the Vista icon > Sleep in the start menu, and all it does is turn off the screen and log off. The fan and hard drive is still running and doesn't seem to be sleeping to me. Anyone else have this problem or any solutions?

 

i can always tell if my dell is in sleep mode- it keeps making little snoring sounds

sorry guys, couldn't resist......

 

Check the power profile settings. You can individually set what the sleep button, shutdown button, power button and lid close actions mean.

 

I have already checked the power profile settings. I had set the power button to sleep and it still doesn't want to go to sleep. Even if i do it manually through the start menu, it still doesn't go to sleep.

 

^^

Same as.

 

Weird. Re-install time!

 

So... for traveling...

Hibernation = Shut down minus the long boot

Just wonder if hibernation is ok when I am traveling my notebook around...

 

Yep, absolutely right.

 

Oh, that's really weird. When mine sleeps (no matter how I do it) everything shuts down and the power light slowly cycles.

Does the power light cycle on yours?

 

You are not alone. I like the feel of knowing that too...

 

If your computer is staying on when you are in sleep mode, you need to check your bios and see if there is an option to change the suspend mode. It sounds like right now you guys are in L2 when you want L3.

 

the other option:

if you'd take a sleeping pill, you'd wouldn't know if it is staying awake

 

Starting with a fresh slate is good. I shut down overnight and restart in the morning. Through the day, sleep works.

 

The sleep mode worked for a few days and then it just stopped working. I'm not worrying too much at the moment because i'm sending my current laptop back and getting a new one anyway. But other people do have this problem too. Maybe cause we are running Bios A07???

 

I'm running A03.

 

If your laptop is not going into sleep mode completely, you may have some old or incorrect ACPI drivers installed. ACPI is the power management part of the laptop (this was the magic bullet that made it so the computer can signal to turn off your power supply on shut down, instead of relying on you to manually switch the computer off.) ACPI now handles power modes for all the hardware, weather it be on, off, or low power. When people complain that windows says its ok to turn your pc off instead of doing it automatically, this is the culprit.

 

i have a m1330 and ive tested and in sleep mode i would say i have a consumption of 2% every 3h and to be honest i dont think its enough... i would be have with something around 1% every 4...5h....anyway

cheerz beto

 

I agree, sleep takes too much power. The alternative is longer startup times and the superfetch will cause allot of disk thrashing for 3/4 minutes at startup. I finally just caved in and run my HP DV6500t the way MS intended. I generally use sleep now. I tried disabling superfetch to cut down on the disk thrashing but my machine loaded my applications slower when I did this. To be brutally honest, MS designed vista to run on tons of memory. Its bloated design demands it. 2 gigs is not optional. As anyone with less then 2 gigs will tell you its a POS.

I suggest trimming down what you can. Personally, I disabled a bunch of crap in the startup (msconfig) and services.msc UAC, defender and windows indexing were not worth the frustration and bloat so they are gone. I wish I could gut out superfetch but its really needed by how MS designed vista. Vista is just a dog without it so I finally realized it had to stay. Once you come to this conclusion you need to put the machine asleep. Otherwise face a crapful of disk thrashing at every boot. So in the end, I wish MS had developed an OS that had lean and mean code from the ground up. Something that was fast and not so damn hardware hungry. But they didn't. Now we have Vista. So if you decide to stay with vista I recommend going along with MS recommendation of leaving superfetch on and using sleep. I find the vista experience is optimized if you do. If you want to take out superfetch and everything else to make it like XP then its better to just install XP because Vista ain't no XP and it never will be. Its bloated at the core and it demands to load a gig into memory before it will give you any kind of decent performance. Vista is an utter failure in the lean coding school of thought. MS created something that was so bloated that its performance was probably 2X slower then XP... So rather then doing a complete rewrite, which they should have done, they created superfetch which basically loads hundreds of megs of data, applications etc.. into memory to keep it closer to XP performance. And in many areas, its still slower and I am still waiting for the damn SP 1 patch to fix the horribly slow network transfers.. which is a joke and is totally inexcusable flaw in a final release of an OS.

What is worse its taking over a year to fix the copy/transfer issue which should have been fixed pronto. It just shows you how lame MS support has become. The transfer problem was obviously so embedded into the core that it was extremely difficult to rewrite and fix. MS bloated design and management team that designed it.. failed miserably.

As we all know, MS spend years spinning their wheels with longhorn. At one point they realized they could not make longhorn work so they stopped that project and basically did a rush job on Vista. Many people are disappointed in Vista since they believe that is what MS came up with after 6 years of development. But in reality it was a rush job. And they raised the price on vista to try to pay for the waisted time and money spent on longhorn which never saw the light of day. Now they realize that Vista is not selling on the retail level so they had to drop the price now.

I also think it was wrong for them to load vista on hardware that could not manage the aero desktop. Putting vista basic on machines with only 512mb of memory that were incapable of running aero was and is now a PR nightmare for Intel and MS. clearly, that whole mess was to fatten up Intels bottom line in the final quarters of 2006 and first quarter of 2007. All because MS screwed up royally in that it took them way to long to release a new OS.. and when they did, it was rushed and intel was not ready to support it. Corporate greed basically screwed over many of the initial buyers of vista and is one of the main reasons why vista has a bad reputation today. Its simply because they released it on too many machines that did not have enough memory and crappy integrated graphics.

In fact, even the first Intel chipset the 955 was inadequate to fully support the aero interface efficiently. It was not until the X3100 came out when there was a decent integrated graphics option. Vista should not have been released at all until the X3100 was ready. This is a case where MS should have worked closer with Intel in getting the hardware end ready before vista. But MS made aero unique that new GPU designs has to be created ground up to support it. In the end, vista had such a shaky start that the only thing that will save M$ is to try it again with a new OS and hopefully they get it right next time.

 

DesertNM hi mate actually the thing is i think my laptop is doing great. i have many thing disabled already, but as far i transfer all my ran in my HD with the sleep mode... so then u supposed to not have power running into the usb pipes... no wireless no nothing so why is it still using that much power? i think it should be much far more efficient then its now a days. i have a 9 cells battery and i can leave my in sleep mode for 4 days for exemple but in another hand im able to do that with a stand by with my mobile!! wth??? if it was in hibernating i would agree but not sleepy mode where all my

however as i said before its normal but i dont think this technology are not in a level that i could say its a "energy efficient". just saying

Later...

 

I know what you mean. If I charge up my 6 cell on my HP and then put it to sleep and unplug it.. it will loose almost 10 percent overnight. I agree with you, if you got the horsepower, vista runs decent enough. My only point in my long winded post is an OS should not in itself need so much system resources... Its ok to have a powerful PC to run games, photo shop etc.. but to need all this hardware to load a OS is pathetic. In the end, there is no good options here. Put it to sleep and loose too much battery life, or shut it down and face long boot times and disk thrashing on superfetch. Nothing good here. Each of us has to choose the lessor of the two evils here. For me, I am willing to loose battery life because I hate the longer boot time and superfetch thrashing.

 

I'm on the comp all day, so I use sleep during my breaks.

I like a shutdown overnight, though I usually fall asleep with the thing still running.

 

if u'r using an ac adapter most of the time--does using hibernate or sleep make any difference?

thank you.

 

Have you tried resetting the sleep settings? (Change "standby" or whatever to something else, hit "apply," change it back again, and hit "apply" one more time). I noticed mine didn't go to stby last night, which it's supposed to do when I hit the Windows start menu power button; ran through the above exercise, and voila, problem fixed!

 

I installed Vista 64bit in a VMWare instance last night with only 1Gig of ram for the VM and it ran surprisingly well! Admittedly, it didn't have any apps installed but it started and ran fine. Used IE a little etc.

It was using 51% of the physical ram.

I've also seen Vista on a new Acer with 512Mb of RAM. Damn it was painful. I spent 2 days stripping stuff out and tuning it so it would open a browser within 60 seconds. I almost shot myself half a dozen times over the two days though... it was sooooooooooooo slow.