Shutting down vs Standby on a VAIO

Seeing as how VAIOs drain power even while powered off, what do you guys think about leaving it on standby permanently vs shutting down? That is, is it worth it to shut down at all? There have been some discussions about the amount of extra work the HDD takes while powering off and on, wearing down the life of the HDD. Thoughts?

 

My personal practice is to set machines to sleep on lid close, with hibernation an hour later. This for me provides a good balance of power drain prevention and immediate usability without fiddling around. Bear in mind however that this will mean that the laptop may power on in your bag to hibernate while being transported. It seems to never done any of my machines any harm since the period they're powered on in that state can't be more than a couple of minutes, but if you are anal about machines it may be an issue.

 

If you regularly let the machine go into hibernation from sleep, you can avoid the machine powering up to hibernate by using "hybrid sleep". This is a sleep mode where all the hibernation saves are done up-front, before going to sleep. When switching from sleep to hibernation, it's then simply a power-off.

If you normally go from wake->sleep->wake, and only occasionally into hibernation, I wouldn't recommend it.
And unless you keep your machine off for a long time at a time, I wouldn't recommend hibernation at all. The machine can stay in sleep state for a long time without losing much battery charge. I prefer having the machine stay at sleep, and only go into hibernation if I manually hibernate it.

 

I find hybrid mode takes too long to sleep, there can be situations for example where I'll close the lid and will want to resume a minute later.

 

I seem to have an issue with my SZ where battery drain is huge in sleep mode (about 50% lost in about 8 hours) unless I turn off the wireless switch before going to sleep. I assumed it was a driver issue, but this also happens in Windows 7, not just Vista. Having said that, the battery is also more than 2 years old, so maybe it's just acting it's age.

Right now, I'm more likely to shut down the machine if I think I won't be using it for more than a few hours, as Windows 7 boots way way faster than Vista used to.

 

Hmmm... Interesting.

Because I noticed once - and this was probably only because I was using one of my Macs and then went straight to wake up the SZ, which I'd kept slept for perhaps half a day while on AC power - that the VPN was still up (wired link).

Usually I shut down the VPN's I use after I've finished or when I'm about to sleep the computer. But on that occasion I didn't and I remember thinking 'that's odd' that the SZ resumed with the VPN still up. I only really noticed it that time as I had to to wake up the Mac and it had obviously dropped the VPN link, then I turned to the SZ straight afterwards to do the same thing.

 

My Vaio Z had about 10% drain after being left on standby for 24 hours. I'll do more testing to reaffirm.

What I want to know is what you guys use: standby or shutdown.

 

Hibernate. Lid close is set to standby. Power button is set to hibernate. If I will be away for a short while I close the lid. If I am traveling with the machine or on battery power I hit the power switch. I very RARELY shut down.

Gary

 

There is an entire thread about this issue. Search Battery Drain and I think you should find it. The Z battery drains either way. I personally standby

 

Doesn't it drain more in standby than it does in shutdown?

Gary

 

I'm very well aware that it drains either way *references my first post*

Which is exactly why I want to hear opinions on what you guys use and why, standby or shutdown (or hibernate if you want to get into semantics).

And possibly to give awareness for people who haven't considered using strictly standby. I made this thread because I accidentally left my comp on standby the other day and after almost 24 hours, it only drained from 85-90% down to 77%, which isn't any different than if it was shut down/hibernated.

 

The way it can power on in your bag from sleep is if you accidentally hit the power button somehow to resume -- but then, that's not any different than normally booting the computer from shutdown/hibernate anyway right? In fact, accidentally powering on from shutdown will take more work from the computer so it is more detrimental.

 

No that's not the only way. If you use the regular sleep mode (rather than hybrid sleep), the system can continue to monitor the battery power and if it drops below a predetermined amount the system can powerup long enough to hibernate. This is a safety measure to prevent data loss, if there is an application running when you put the machine to sleep. That's why the engineers came up with the hybrid sleep mode. It creates a hibernation file and goes to sleep. Then it monitors the battery and if it drops below a certain level the machine just powers off, without the need to wake up first since the hibernation file already exists.

Gary

 

Scuderia explained how hybrid mode works. My problem with the hybrid mode comes from the way I use the notebooks - as I said, sometimes I'll need to power up a machine literally a minute after I've closed the lid on it. In addition I don't want it to stay on until I manually command it to go into sleep.

Whatever hybrid mode does, it occupies my machines for quite a long time while it's going into 'guarded sleep' - even on some of my SSD'd machines, especially the UX. So for me it wasn't working because I want to sleep and resume immediately if necessary.

So lid close is assigned sleep, power button is assigned hibernate, and the machine is set to hibernate after a certain period of sleep. This means that a) I can manually hibernate the machine if I know I'm not going to be using it for a while, b) it goes to sleep when I close the lid but will wake up straight away as well and c) it will transition to hibernate if I just sent it to sleep and haven't used it for a while.

 

Are you sure about that? Where did you hear that? It doesn't say anything about monitoring the battery and powering up, while in sleep mode, in the manual.

Here's what it says on page 141.

If the battery runs out of power while your computer is in Sleep mode, you will lose all unsaved data. Going back to the previous work state is impossible. To avoid loss of data, you should save your data frequently.

 

Used to dealing with the dense yet proud among my fellow Mac users, not so much though for people who made the right choice.

If you look in Power Options and change advanced settings, under battery you'll notice that you can perform certain action at low and critical battery levels - one of them being Hibernate.

Hybrid Sleep on the other hand saves a hibernate image before it goes to sleep. So - if you lose power, the hibernate image is still there. The advantage is that once the system is sleeping, waking it up is quick but you're covered if there's a power screwup for any reason.

However, as I said the tradeoff is that the system is taking time saving the hibernate info after every sleep - so if you assign lid close to sleep and you're using Hybrid Sleep, what happens is that even if you want to resume a minute or so after you closed the lid, you can't because it's still saving the hibernate file - you have to wait for it to finish that, go to sleep - then you can wake it up again.

This is a major hassle in notebook use and also uses more power because at every sleep it's saving a 2/4Gb memory snapshot, which is why hybrid sleep is usually only recommended for desktops.

The Low and Critical battery action takes place independently of hybrid sleep. These will power on your machine if it's slept and do what it says it should do - including hibernate.

I use hibernate and sleep in different modes as I said - sleep for short term standby, and hibernate either manually or automatically when I'm not expecting to use the machine for a while. I have Hibernate set as a Critical Battery action but this doesn't kick in unless I actually run the battery down.

Capiche?

 

I'm not talking about Hybrid Sleep, just regular Hibernate (edit: meant regular sleep ). Your earlier complaints about Hybrid Sleep made sense.

But okay, it seems like you are talking about critical mode (mine is set to 5%) so that is not a problem at all! I assumed you were talking about the computer randomly turning on while in your bag -- since it does not do this, that does not seem to be a problem (plus you can turn it off I think).

I've had the comp on sleep from 100% 8 hours ago so I'll post what % it's on in 2 hours. But, if there's no difference in power drain, it seems to me that there is no advantage to using Hibernate or Shut down, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I know I'm just plain silly but I use "Shut-Down" all the time. I guess I've grown accustomed to this habit & sadly, I'm kinda resistant to changing this bad habit.

 

Well it is never too late to change to what's better for the computer my dear friend.

 

-15% after 10 hours, looks like it is a bit much.

 

Shut down/ Hibernate and restarting almost take similar times in my laptop.

 

This is normal in sleep mode.

 

This post is one away from my 'I'm talking to an idiot' posting style.

In the same power settings, which would of course be the first place you'd look if you had any interest in power management, you can see the setting for Hibernate - and you can trigger Hibernate after xxxx minutes.

So what I do is to set Hibernate after usually one hour. This way, I always sleep my laptops, but if they are not used for over an hour, they turn themselves on and engage Hibernate. This can be while they are being transported. It's not an accidental power-on.

If you have nothing open it might be the case.

 

And this post is one away from talking to a 'condescending idiot' posting style.

I don't see that in the advanced power setting.
edit: probably because I didn't re-enable Hibernate after fresh install. Oh and you can turn it off, bet you didn't know that.

And here's what you said word for word "If you look in Power Options and change advanced settings, under battery you'll notice that you can perform certain action at low and critical battery levels - one of them being Hibernate."

I don't think I misinterpreted what you said in any way. Sounds like the case to me.

Capiche?

 

I'm not sure exactly where this is going, except perhaps to compound the first line in post 16.

I may have been a little hard and I'm sorry about that, but I don't like people who don't take a basic poke around before assuming things.