Sleep function safe enough for carrying around the laptop?

Not sure if this thread is in the right location, but I was wondering if using the sleep function would be safe enough for carrying around the laptop in a backpack.

I used to use hiberanate, but it has become much slower in Vista, and sleep has become faster.

I was thinking that since in hibernate, the HDDs are off, so are safe from being bumped around, but perhaps I'm underestimating the reliability of HDDs during sleep (when they're slightly? on).

 

using safe mode while traveling is a-ok and nothing to worry about. done it for years and no problems to date with it.

 

Personally, I wouldn't put a computer in a bag unless it is off in a way that the only way to start it is pushing on the power button. Hibernation, which I have used for years, falls into that category, but I wouldn't trust sleep because hardware and software can wake the computer. There are some (OK, not many) horror stories about people who have opened their bags to find very hot computers and with melted parts due to the cooling system being ineffective. Some of these are caused by computers waking up, but the other possibility is that the computer wasn't shut down properly before being put away. I don't think damage to the HDD is a risk: The heads get parked after a short period of inactivity and you can set a powerdown timeout for the HDD as a power management option.

I have also found that some drivers can get confused by sleep mode so they don't restart properly. Maybe this has been fixed under Vista, but I have found hibernation to be more reliable.

Hibernation time depends on the size of the RAM contents (not the maximum RAM installed) and the HDD data transfer speed. Vista's bigger RAM footprint is probably what is causing the longer time. You can speed up the process by making sure that the hibernation file is near the beginning of the HDD (transfer speed near the end may only be half that at the start) and is in one single block. There may be defrag software which offers this facility, but Diskeeper, which I am using, doesn't appear to offer this facility. Alternatively, get a faster HDD, which will speed up hibernation and resume.

A quick test before I finish this post. On my X60 plus, hibernation with RAM in use of about 1GB (according to Task Manager) took about 65 seconds, but the first 25 seconds were spend in shutting down processes before the Windows showed the saving to HDD progress bar. Restart took only 40s.

John

 

Thanks Red (I believe you mean 'sleep' not 'safe' mode :] ) and John!

John: good thing I read your post, as I was thinking of upgrading to 2gb ram (probably still should... I have the vista minimum of 1gb) to help speed up hibernate and shutdown times. I guess it won't help much in that department?

Also good read on the reasoning for Vista's slower hibernate times. Will normal defragging also help (even if I don't have an option of moving the hibernation file near the beginning of the HDD)?

 

If the hibernation file is fragmented then defragging will help it. It shouldn't be fragmented because it is a one-off creation when you enable hibernation (but it will be enlarged if you add more RAM). You might want to look at UltimateDefrag. I haven't used this software so I can't warrant for its performance, but it looks quite clever. It should do the defragging you need and also, by moving the little used files to the slow end of the disc, then be able to move the hibernation file somewhere faster.

John