win7's "hybrid sleep" vs. sleep vs. hibernate

In win7, when I enabled "hybrid sleep" did it replace the old sleep mode, the old hibernation mode, or is it an additional new mode entirely?

And if it exists in addition to the previous sleep and hibernation modes, how do I engage it? Both the win7 and thinkpad power utilities seem only to allow one to engage sleep or hibernate.

 

Hybrid sleep means that when you put your computer into sleep, it will still copy over the RAM's contents to the hibernation file as backup, but it will keep the RAM modules on, with all the data still on it, to boot at the same speed as if it were sleeping.

Basically, the advantage of hybrid sleep over sleep is that even if you remove power, your data is still safe. The disadvantage as compared to "normal" sleep is that it takes your computer longer to go into sleep because it needs to copy everything to your hard drive.

 

hybrid sleep is mainly designed for desktops, and hibernate mode is for laptops.
in hybrid sleep the computer still draws some power (very little though, just like in sleep mode), whereas in hibernate mode it should not require any power. so you see how it fits with each one - desktop is always plugged in, whereas laptop can run on battery.
hybrid sleep also resumes faster, like coming out of sleep mode, as midnightsun pointed out.

 

Does Win 7's hibernate mode continues to draw power from the battery like Vista? In Vista, there's always a noticeable drop in the battery meter when the machine is place in hibernation mode.

 

I am about 100% you are not hibernating, but just good old S3 suspending (sleeping) if your system is showing a drop in power after you have hit the hibernate/sleep button.

I quick way to check is: Use whatever mechanism you use to put your computer to "hibernate" and then wake the computer back up. If you see the bios screen after wake up, you are indeed hibernating, if not you are sleeping.

S4 or hibernate, or suspend to disk, as its sometimes called, just takes the data currently in your ram and writes it to disk. It then proceeds to shut itself down while setting a ACPI switch that tells the system "This is no ordinary shutdown, I am hibernating"

So unless your system uses power while it is shutdown(no lBM/Lenovo has ever done that), it does not use it when it hibernates. The only thing I can think of is that it takes a small amount of power (less than 1%) to actually do the hibernation process. This is a sunken cost, if you will, the same if you hibernate for a minute or a year.

 

Not all computers will boot into BIOS when waking from hibernating......

BTW, hybrid sleep, sleep and hibernation are all mutually exclusive. They are an either/or option. You can't have all, or some. Just one.

 

Obviously you can't have more than one at a time, but you do have the choice of enabling one option or another. The original question was whether hybrid sleep replaced either traditional sleep or hybernate, when it was enabled. Both win7 and ThinkPad utilities allow only sleep (Fn+F4) or hibernate (Fn+F12).

To rephrase the original question, if you enable hybrid sleep, what happens when you press Fn+F4 or Fn+F12.

 

Actually, this has been reported on some machines:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=52879
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T5...2;jsessionid=3BE82E03E7BD3C640EC033504EDB1FD0
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=223811

It *shouln't* use battery, but for some it does.

 

on vista my thinkpad would use about 2% battery power on hibernate overnight. and i did both hibernation and resume with the cord plugged in. once i've switched to win7, it no longer eats up battery power. another kudos to win7!

also my battery charge thresholds are remembered in win7, even though i haven't installed power manager or any power management driver from lenovo. so that's pretty cool too!

 

Correct me if I misunderstood, but...

Those all seem to imply that the system is using hybrid sleep and hence not actually hibernating when the switch is hit, instead opting to sleep for a few hrs before going into hibernating, I assume its done to make the system seem more instant.

 

I know the difference between hibernate and sleep and the suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-ram.

sleep = the crescent moon indicator on/flashing, draws power and you're back on the saddle with Fn-F4 (at least on my X61).

hibernate = ALL indicators OFF. But when you power back on, restores the machine to the exact same state it was before hiberation.

I never face the power drain issue when I hibernate with XP, albeit not on a ThinkPad.

Anyway, my online research reveal that it could have something to do with wake-on-LAN. Some mention was made also about HD audio, while other speculate it was something to do with either Vista updates or even ThinkPad drivers.

So what's the final, definitive word on this irritant?

I seldom use hibernate but it's still annoying to live with this regressive feature/bug/whatyoumaycallit.

Sorry to hijack this thread about Vista's Hiberate, when it should be about Win 7.

I'm happy Win 7 users are spare this annoyance. Will migrate to Win 7 in time...

 

yes you misunderstood. in my example: i hibernate the laptop at night. not hybrid sleep, but hibernate. no lights are on, nothing. then i pull out the plug. in the morning i plug it back in and then press the power button to start the computer. it resumes and when i check my battery indicator, it's usually 2% lower than what i left it at night.

with win7 i don't have that issue anymore. now to be fair, i haven't installed all the drivers (like i haven't installed intel amt), so maybe those have something to do with battery drainage and not win7 itself.

 

Yes I noticed this too. Wasn't sure what to make of it, but I ended up installing Lenovo's power manager anyway. It only uses about 548k of RAM according to Task Manager, so it's not much of a burden on the system.

 

yeah in time, i think i'll get that too. it offers lots more configurations beyond the basic win7 choices, like battery stretch. but for now i'm just running win7 with bare minimum drivers to see what shortcomings from vista are carried over. so far none that i could find!