sleep vs hibernate in Windows 8

On my new laptop with Windows 8, I find that my laptop restores operation significantly quicker with sleep vs. hiberate. So I'm prefering sleep vs hibernate when running on AC, and on battery power.
Other than a very small drain on my battery when my laptop is closed and in my bag for a few hours,
is there any harm in using sleep vs hibernate?

 

The only thing to be concerned about with sleep is that there could be triggers that cause it to bring itself out of sleep automatically while in your bag. With Hibernate essentially the session is being written to storage and power cut to the BIOS so that wouldn't happen.

 

Hibernate has to write the contents of RAM to the drive and then read it back into RAM when resuming, that's why it's normally slightly longer to resume from hibernate than sleep. Personally, I don't see the point in hibernate if you have a SSD, it's not like boot and resume from hibernate are that different with that.

Other than that, RCB covered it.

 

i don't see the point in either, better to just do a shutdown.

 

Do you have an SSD in the computer?

 

mechanical hard drive (no SSD)

 

Ok, cool,when you put it into the carrycase I would recommend hibernate for traveling. When fixed stationed you can sleep or just leave it on all the time and set it so when the lid closes to "do nothing" in the power options - it then just turns off the display. Also you can set the display to turn off after set minutes automatically.

Consider getting an SSD sometime, they're fast and fun and no vibration!

 

I agree with hibernate when you're transporting the laptop for extended periods of time, it's rare, but I've seen laptops come out of sleep in their bags a few times.

 

Hmm, I guess you don't have a lot going on most of the time? I have 16 tabs open in Chrome, 4 open in Firefox and Lotus Notes, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Evernote Acrobat Reader, Skype for Business, a VM in VMWare and Slack open right now. I'm using 14 of 16GB of memory and have a 1TB SSD. I am on the move a lot and restarting/re-opening all that lot would be a major chore. For my use-case, Sleep and Hibernate have been the major productivity enhancement in recent Windows OS's.

I put the machine to sleep for minor moves, but if I get in the car or on a plane or put the laptop in the notebook bag, it goes into hibernate.

I killed a Dell once by putting it to sleep, and it waking up in my laptop bag, in the trunk of my car in Austin, TX when it was over 100 outside. When I finally got the dell out of my bag 2 hours later, it was so hot I couldn't physically hold it in my hands. It was dead from that point on.

 

Sleep and Hibernate isn't exactly a "recent" feature.