x61s - how best to use sleep vs hibernation

I have an X61s with 8 cell battery and use the ThinkPad Default setting. When not in use the laptop is in sleep mode ( as a matter of default when Vista is powered down ). I have noted that if I enter sleep mode with the battery at 100 percent (and keep unplugged) and then restart the machine next day I am down to 80 percent. I assume this is the low power draw in sleep mode. The default setting lists 'never' for hibernation even there is an option to hibernate after xxx minutes of sleep mode. This raises two questions I don't know how to answer.

1) What is the rate of battery drawdown in sleep mode?

2) How do others utilize hibernation ( as an adjunct to sleep ) on their Vista Thinkpads?

All comments welcome.....

 

Hibernation is meant for a more long term kind of Standby. Whereas in Standby the computer simply turns off nearly all devices yet still delivers power to RAM, Hibernate creates a snapshot of your computer's current state on your hard drive and then *completely* turns off.

The benefit of standby is that, say if you are moving from one location to another, such as from classroom to classroom, and the two destinations aren't far apart in your opinion, Standby enables quick recovery.

The benefit of hibernation is that, say if you are going in between a large distance you can use Hibernate for faster startup than from a regular shutdown / startup. It is slower than standby, which is nearly instantaneous, but again faster than a complete shutdown and startup.

 

So what's the difference between sleep and standby? Or did Vista just change the name of standby to sleep?

 

I believe its just renamed. However I cannot say for sure as I had Vista Ultimate on my computer for *literally* 30 minutes before I got rid of it. However, with the latest wave of upcoming performance, compatibility, and reliability patches set to come out I may go back to Vista again.

 

I tried to use hibernate on Vista (business) before, but I found that the superfetch information does not get cached after a hibernation. I thought this was annoying having the superfetch cache over 1GB of data from the hard drive again and again.

So now I just use sleep and disable hibernate completely. And your power consumption pretty is much the same as mine, which is around 1% per hour for sleep mode (this is on the 8cell).