Battery life: Hibernate or Shut Down?

Tried searching the forums and googling, but no luck.

As the title says, which is better for battery life? Hibernate or Shut Down? Does booting from complete shut down use more battery life?

Thanks!

EDIT: If this isn't the right section for this topic, sorry. Just move to its proper subforum.

 

Hibernation stores your system state on the hard disk and then turns off the computer, so it shouldn't use any more power than a normally shut down system.

Standby needs a bit more power than Hibernation/Shutdown because it keeps the system state in RAM, which needs to be refreshed to keep its content, therefore requiring power.

 

For me I'll usually hibernate to conserve battery life when walking from class to class (about 10 to 15 min between) rather than stand by.

 

I find that moving between classes hibernate takes too long and the initial surge from reading the 2Gigs of Hibernate file almost negates the difference in savings.

My rule of thumb is >1hour for hibernate. Shutting down never enters my mind unless it's a required update or install restart.

 

While the computer is in hibernation, it's turned off

 

He has XP home, so all stated above is true.

Just adding some info here considering Vista, in case someone has it.

Vista has the Hibrid sleep function - something in between hibernation and sleep. USBs and RAM are powered, but nothing else. Hard disk stores RAM image and notebook falls asleep, so in case you take out battery (or it is drained out) and power - it will obviously turn off completely but will start waking from hibernation on the next boot, otherwise it will use a bit of battery since RAM is also powered, but it wakes up instantly.

Notebook is cool and quiet until you need it - and then is instantly on. The best feature in power management I have seen so far. Battery is almost untouched even if you leave it for hours like this. Don't leave it with the USB HD connected - it will continue spinning - draining the battery.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

i have a different experience with it
for me, vista hibrid sleep took to long in my opinion. it was more comparable to xp hibernation than to xp sleep. i'll check them better later tough

tebore's rule of >1h hibernation seems good too

 

You didn't read what he wrote. Hybrid is a combination of hibernate and sleep. It creates the hibernate file and then goes into sleep mode. It is primarily for desktop machines. The hibernate file is there in case of a power failure.

On MOST laptop installations Hybrid sleep is disabled, because most power schemes will wake a sleeping machine after the battery reaches a certain low point and automatically go into hibernate. I have seen reports that it is POSSIBLE to enable hybrid sleep on a laptop, but I am not sure why you would need to given the correct power managment settings.

Gary

 

I've tried using both sleep and hybrid sleep on my laptop, but unfortunately actually entering sleep seems to be a problem (plugged in, I haven't been running on battery much yet, so I haven't really tested if the problem is there as well).
Usually it will work if the laptop has only been turned on for a short time, but otherwise it will start going into sleep, shutting down the screen and perhaps a few other components, but then it will just keep searching for God knows what on the harddisk and it never goes any further.
Forcing a shut down with the power button is then the only option.

I think I had found the source of the problem a couple of times - first the graphics card driver, then having an external harddrive plugged in - but none of those turned out to be the culprit afterall (well, the hdd anyway, I've only tried two graphics card drivers, but one of them is the official one from Asus).

 

This is my thought exactly, why are notebook users even trying to use hybrid sleep? It was designed for desktops that don't have any backup source of power in case of a power failure. Notebooks have a battery which will activate as soon as the mains power is lost therefore there is no need for hybrid sleep on a notebook.

I personally use sleep(standby) more than hibernate as it is quicker this is especially true if I am only powering down the notebook for a few minutes. I have had no problems with sleep in vista.

I somewhat agree with tebore but my power settings are a bit more conservative; set to sleep after 15mins and hibernate after 30mins while on battery. These power scheme numbers suit me quite well.

 

hibernate takes too long imo.. sleep is fine inbetween class and when im home i shut it down.

 

the exact same thing happens here, have to hold power button to shut it down, i don't have a clue what could be happening

 

I just found this on another board.

http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=672705

"I had that same problem on my desktop (I have a wireless keyboard and mouse but they weren't the problem)

Here's what I did

1. Open Power Settings, choose the plan you have selected
2. Click change plan settings
3. Click change advanced power setting
4. Enable the setting under USB settings->USB slective suspend setting
5. If any of you are on a home network and/or have a media center extender, go to Multimedia Settings (under advanced power sttings)->When sharing media->and choose "Allow the computer to sleep"

All done, tell me how it works...also I apparently could go into S1 or S2 either, so I think that has nothing to do with it."

The USB Selective Suspend setting was disabled in my power plan, and since I've got an USB hub (never tried unplugging that one, only the external harddrives connected through it) a wireless mouse and a laptop cooler plugged, I imagine one of those could be the problem.
I tried hibernation instead of sleep just half an hour ago and ran into the exact same problem - it wouldn't enter full sleep mode.

I just tried sleep after changing that setting and it worked. It's still a bit too soon to say if the problem is fixed though, as it's often worked before if the laptop hasn't gone long before the last reboot.