Vista Sleep, How much Power?

I've had a question bothering me... I really like Vista sleep mode, it is fast and boots back almost instantly, but I've never used it because I know it consumes power because the image is stored in the RAM. For this reason, I have always used Hibernate. But when thinking about it, Hibernate uses quite a bit of battery power to boot back up (about 1-2% sometimes). Does anyone know if thats about how much an all day sleep would take up? Sometimes I notice that the est battery life in sleep goes up to like 225 or 300 hours, meaning that all day would only be maybe a 5% discharge... thus being worth it as a trade off for quicker boot times.

 

i personally have never used the hibernate function; in my past Dell laptops i disabled that function only to use the stand-by feature. when i took my 700m to classes with me and put it in stand-by at the end of class, the next time i opened it, like 15-20 minutes later my battery had not really been drained all that much. so in essence, i prefer the stand-by mode.

 

I'm not sure how much power it takes, but perhaps this might help you in any case:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6185330.html

EDIT: I'm not sure if this is just for desktop pc's or laptops...

 

I'm curious - where did you get your numbers regarding power consumption when resuming from hibernation?

 

I've used Vista's Sleep mode on my current laptop and I love it. One time I closed the lid when I went to sleep too. Seven hours later when I had awakened from my slumber, the laptop awoke with very minimal battery usage: only 5% had been used. ==>

 

yea i used sleep all day today and only lost 1% of battery power... Looks like i've converted from from a hibernated lappy to a sleepy one.

 

It depends... My 2 year old Gateway laptop (Pentium Centrino M) dies after 5 hours in sleep mode. It doesn't have the low-power technology though... I don't think.

 

AFAIK it's supposed to be a "smart" combo of suspend and hibernate, and my guess was it'll suspend itself for a period of time and after X minutes or Y% of battery life is left - it'll auto hibernate...but I'm not sure - because my experience has been great, LITTLE TO NO POWER consumption when in Sleep - and everyones comments above confirm this

 

Yep, well i let it sleep all night from a 100% charge (2am-9am) and it lost about 6%. A little more than I had hoped for, but when I'm at grad school and need quick access, It'll be worth it. I do have a 6+9 cell so I think I can cover the day.

 

Keep in mind that in suspend, the laptop is still 'on' in the sense that there is still power going through it - this could be interesting in a confined space, such as a backpack. I'm not sure how much heat it outputs while in suspend, but could potentially lead to some issues if it's stuffed somewhere for a long period of time.

 

yah true but, if he has a backpack desigined for that i have a Victorinox Swiss Army one that has its built in vents for the laptop very cool no pun intended...

 

Well the vista sleep is much different than XP suspend. In XP suspend the computer was still effectively ON. Laptops built WITH vista and bios for vista turn off almost completely, except for a small amount of power keeping the ram charged in order to keep the image alive for quick access. The iPod does something similar... you never turn those off, just sleep them.

So there is no heat at all, the computer is effectively... off.

 

^ ah that is interesting to know

 

From what I understand, Vista's sleep state just combines the sleep and hibernate states available in XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/fastsleepandresume.mspx

From Microsoft's description, your data is stored to both your RAM and hard disk. It still uses a small amount of power to keep the RAM active. This is the same as XP's sleep state. Now the added benefit is that if your computer does lose power to even keep the RAM active, everything will still be available in your hard disk.

So, it shouldn't offer much in terms of power savings over XP's sleep mode.

 

Actually, you are misunderstanding a third new process called Hybrid sleep, which is NOT available on laptop models. Hybrid sleeps stores it on both, so that of the power goes out on a tower while its sleeping, you don't lose everything. Vista on a laptop simply uses normal sleep mode and then if it detects a critical battery level, will boot up and convert to hibernate mode.

And as a side point, if anyone slept their XP laptop, they'd ussualy get a few hours and it would suck battery life, according to my tests I can get 224 to 300 hours of sleep.

 

You're right, hybrid sleep mode is only for desktops. However, sleeping my XP laptop in the past has always taken only a few percentages of the battery after several hours. Something around 1% per hour or less.

In any case, the basis behind the sleep and suspend modes in XP and Vista are essentially the same. The laptop is still 'on' in the sense that parts of it are still active - and as a result could still mean issues if stored in a confined space for a long period of time.

 

Are you sure? My laptop dies in a few hours on sleep mode :-(.

 

hmm... then that makes me wonder if sleep is really a hardware thing as well as a software thing

 

The new Intel chips (compared to my Centrino M) might hafta do something with it. I'm not sure...

 

Hybrid sleep is definately available on my 1720, it's under "Advanced>Show Options Not Normally Available". I've tested it and it is definately sleep + hibernate.

I put the laptop to sleep, wait a few minutes and then press the power button to turn it back on, and it goes on immediately without the "Dell" boot screen, back to the desktop with everything I left open.

Then I put it to sleep and pull the AC power cord (no battery installed), wait 10 minutes, turn it back on and it goes to the "Dell" boot screen, then the "Resuming Windows" screen, loads from the HDD for a few minutes, then everything I left open is back.

 

Interesting, so the hybrid sleep mode is available. Although I do not see any reason to use it on a laptop, because sleep should do fine, and it will go to hibernate if there is any problem with the power consumption. I suppose this could insure a situation where the battery fell out... although I've never had that happen.

 

Hybrid sleep was never intended to be a replacement for sleep. Let's talk about the terminology in Vista:

Hibernate = Vista/XP saves the system state (essentially the contents of RAM) to the hard drive and shuts off the machine. Resuming takes as long as it takes to re-read in the contents of memory off the drive and resume the system.

Sleep = Vista/XP puts the machine into S3 mode (system standby). Depending on the BIOS and a bunch of other factors, this typically means powering down the laptop or desktop or server so that you still keep the contents in RAM, but the CPU clocks down to almost nothing, and peripherals and the like are powered off. In some cases that includes the network card, and in other cases it doesn't. Resuming is simply a matter of increasing the power...nothing to read off the hard drive to resume state.

Hybrid Sleep = Vista saves the system state to the hard drive, just like in hibernate, but rather than shutdown it then goes into S3, like in sleep/standby. This is not going to make your system sleep/standby any faster...in fact, it will be just as slow as hibernate. However, it will resume much faster, giving you the "resume performance" of sleep/standby. It has the added bonus, as mentioned earlier in this thread of being a guarantee against power loss. If you lose all power to the system, Vista recovers just like it was coming back from hibernate, since it has all the state information saved already.

Now the part that can and does add confusion is that with the revamped power profile options in Vista (a very welcome update I might add), it's not immediately obvious what the sleep settings may do by default...worse, your OEM might have tweaked them. When you go to standby, you have no way of knowing if sleep is standby or hybrid sleep...which is why you should check your power profile settings carefully and select what makes the most sense for you. For me...as a rule, I don't use hybrid sleep...not because I don't see the value in it, but rather because I prefer standby instead -- I want Vista to go to S3 as fast as possible, preferably in under 3 seconds.

Hope that wasn't too confusing and helps answer some questions.

PS: A link that might be of some interest to those who, like me, want a laptop that can go to S3/standby in a couple of seconds:

http://jvert.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5B074284162A63E3!373.entry

I haven't gotten it down to one second...but I'd love to hear any insights people might have.

 

That sounds rather like my experience. I ordered an m1330 on June 29th. Imagine my surprise when the order confirmation advised that the "estimated ship date" is August 3. That's the longest it has ever taken me to get ANY computer by a factor of like 4x (usually takes a week, tops). Makes me wonder if maybe Dell jumped the gun on this one -- announced it and started taking orders before they had enough parts to handle the load.

I mean, look, you ordered two or three days after I did... and your ship date is two WEEKs later than mine!

In the meantime, I wandered into an Apple store last Sunday and walked out with a MacBook. I think I succumbed to the hype. Want to be cool Mac guy, not PC shlub. MacOS is interesting, but I still have to have Windows (XP) running in Parallels, which seems to work OK, but if I'm still going to be doing everything in Windows.... why bother?

So I sit, like you, and wait for the m1330 and hope the August 3 estimated ship date turns out to be reliable. One of the things I do like about the Mac is the "sleep" function. Just close the lid, come back and it starts right up again wherever I left off.

But the 1330 will have an actual (forward) "delete" key...

--PS

 

See "Won't sleep eventually drain my mobile PC battery?":
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/help/335c6a5d-0304-4af1-b135-6bf6c124dc111033.mspx