Techie Briefing: The difference between Hibernate and Standby

[andrewducker]

I was explaining to my mother the difference between "Standby" and "Hibernate" in Windows, and when to use each of them - and it occurred to me that many people might not know what they are, what the difference is, and how to use them.

Standby is dead simple - your computer basically goes to sleep. All the programs are paused, all of the peripherals (disk drives, graphics cards, etc) turn off, and it goes into a very low power mode that keeps the memory stable but does nothing else. That way when you tell it to power back up it can just pick up exactly from where it left off. You're still sucking up power, but on any modern PC it'll be a very small amount.

Hibernate is slightly more complex. Again, everything is paused, but then the contents of memory are saved off to a great big file on the hard drive, and then the computer actually turns off. When you turn it on again, rather than Windows proper restarting, the contents of that file are read back into memory and life picks up from where it left off. This takes a bit longer than restarting from standby, but takes up no power at all.

I tend to use standby if I'm popping out to the shops, and hibernate overnight - restarting entirely once a week or so, when Windows starts playing up (I've got so much pointless crap installed that strangeness sets in after a while).

Hibernate is visible from the shutdown menu if you press Shift, or just press "H" when you see the menu and it will go into hibernate mode. If that doesn't work then go to the Control Panel, open the Power Options and check "Enable Hibernation" on the Hibernation tab.

Comments

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Oh, THANK you. Ever since I got my new computer it's been going into hibernate/ sleep if you ignore it for 20 minutes, and it was very irritating, especially since it wasn't waking up from it properly - I always had to restart. (Or possibly I just hadn't figured out what to press.)

Now I have managed to find the Power Options in Vista, I think I've fixed it. Hurray!

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

I'm rather bad about using either of them with my desktops (though it's a different story with my laptop). Not very eco-friendly of me, although the power company loves it I'm sure.

Just to add on--standby is typically the default action when you close a laptop lid and is very useful when you're on the move with it. Not so good to do overnight if it's not plugged in, though, because the drain on the battery will be noticeable--hibernate's better for that.

[matgb]

Aye, and being new to having a laptop and not knowing the hibernate option exists, this has been useful new knowledge. Külness.

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

You could also mention that if you have 'sleep' and 'wake up' on your keyboard you can programme sleep to mean hibernate or standby by going to 'control panel' and then 'hardware' and then 'power options' : )