Windows Vista: Sleep vs. Hibernate

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Goche
  • Start date Start date
J

John Goche

Hello,

Could anyone explain to me from a theoretical
or practical point of view what exactly is the
difference between the Windows Vista
Sleep and Hibernate options on the
shutdown menu from the start button?

Thanks,

John Goche
 
John Goche said:
Hello,

Could anyone explain to me from a theoretical
or practical point of view what exactly is the
difference between the Windows Vista
Sleep and Hibernate options on the
shutdown menu from the start button?
Click to expand...

"Sleep" spins down hard disks, darkens the monitor, does everything
possible to cut energy use short of turning the machine off. The
machine can recover from this state quite quickly.

Hibernation involves writing the contents of RAM and Video memory to a
disk file, then turning the machine off. No energy at all is used in
hibernation, since the machine is dead. When you boot your machine, it
looks for a hibernation file on the disk. If it finds one, then it
uses it to reinstate your previous session. If not, then it boots
normally.
 
"Sleep" spins down hard disks, darkens the monitor, does everything
possible to cut energy use short of turning the machine off. The
machine can recover from this state quite quickly.

Hibernation involves writing the contents of RAM and Video memory to a
disk file, then turning the machine off. No energy at all is used in
hibernation, since the machine is dead. When you boot your machine, it
looks for a hibernation file on the disk. If it finds one, then it
uses it to reinstate your previous session. If not, then it boots
normally.
Click to expand...

Sleep mode status depends on how it is defined in BIOS.
E.g. in ACPI S1 - POS state ( power on standby )
all or most of components are on, just on low power state.
In ACPI S3 - STR state ( Save to RAM) all is switched off,
even CPU, only RAM is powered, slowly refreshed.

Hibernation is called also as ACPI S4 state - STD ( save to disk ).

Vista offers also so called hybrid mode, combining both.
it will save status to hibernation file in case of power failure,
bust stays is S1 or S3 power state, as Sleep does.
 
Vista has what is called hybrid sleep. It is a combination of sleep and
hibernation.

When the computer goes into sleep (either by the sleep timer or by you
manually placing the computer into sleep mode) the hibernation file is also
created.

When you wake the computer normally it resumes from sleep.

The nice part is - if the power should fail for any reason the computer will
resume from the hibernation file. It takes a bit longer but it brings you
back to the same state that sleep would have, had the power not interrupted.
 
Type in a command prompt

powercfg -h on

You probably told Disk Cleanup to delete the hibernate file
 
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