Thread: Sleep or hibernate

There are other ways of speeding up Windows Startup. If you put your XP PC into Standby, it will go into a low¬power state, turning off hard disks and the monitor but retaining the current state of Windows and applications in memory. When you press a key, Windows will resume in a fraction of the normal boot time. You can opt either to return to the Welcome screen or your desktop in either case the latter will be as you left it. The disadvantages of this are that your are still consuming energy and, should the power fail, you may lose unsaved data. XP's Hibernate saves the current state of the PC to disk before shutting down the PC completely. It still has to reboot but it will save re-opening all the programs, files and folders you were using.



Vista does things slightly differently, with two standby or sleep modes. Normal sleep is primarily designed for laptops. It's similar to XP sleep except that should the battery level fall below a safe level, the contents of the memory are saved to disk - just as with Hibernate. Hybrid sleep mode is for desktop PCs and works the opposite way round it first saves memory to disk, in the same way as Hibernation, and then goes into Standby. This way, you won't lose data with a power failure, but you'll still get the normal fast return.

To enable this, open the Power Options, and with any power plan selected, click' Change Plan Settings'. In the next dialogue, click' Change Advanced Power Settings'. In the next dialogue, expand the Sleep entry and the Allow hybrid sleep entry. If you use Standby or Hibernate regularly, it's a good idea to close down Windows and restart normally every so often. This will flush the system, clear up memory leaks and close processes that may not be needed.