Sleep or Shutdown?

Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2004
Posts
2,554
Whats the story with this new sleep thing in Vista?

I know how to change the power buttons on the pc and Windows to "Shutdown", but I was wondering if I'm better off using the default sleep mode. How much power does sleep mode use?

I have these visons of electrifrying myself by forgeting to Shutdown before changing hardware :eek:
 
I'm interested in this as well. I think you'd find it hard to forget to actually shut down since the fans etc. keep spinning.

My guess it that it reduces your cpu multiplier lots (if supported anyway), don't know what else it does because you seem to stay connected to everything.
 
Zogger said:
I'm interested in this as well. I think you'd find it hard to forget to actually shut down since the fans etc. keep spinning.
They shouldn't - default should be S3 standby, as long as it's enabled in the BIOS.

This keeps power only to the RAM, using next to nothing just to keep it from losing data. Turning back on from this point takes around 3 seconds.

Default in Vista is something called Hybrid sleep. This goes into S3 standby, but also saves all the RAM to the HDD - just like Hibernate. Hence a 'hybrid' of sleep and hibernate.

It basically means that if your computer loses power while in S3 standby, it will recover from the HDD as if resuming from a hibernated state. So you can just put your computer on standby and unplug & move it without issue, for example.

All seems to work quite well - certainly nicer than full shutdown/boot cycles.
 
what % of power would be used in Hybrid sleep compared to having the pc on normally

edit:spelling mistake
 
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