Understanding Sleep And Hibernate Power Settings On Your Computer

Nowadays, computers come with two types of new power settings that may be unknown to many people. These settings are known as SLEEP and HIBERNATE. The settings “sleep” and “hibernate” may sound entertaining and playful but these are actually powerful tools for extending the life of your computer, giving your laptop extended battery life, and wasting less energy. Here saving energy is most important. Let’s take a glance at how to get the most benefit out of these latest settings.

Sleep Mode

Let’s say you’re heading for lunch, a meeting, or going to run some errands, but you are sure that you will come back to use your computer in a few hours. You might like to turn your computer off to save electricity, but your “computer guy” (or girl) told you it’s unsafe to turn your computer on and off all the time, so what are you going to do? This would be an excellent time for you to use the setting named “sleep mode” on your computer. When you tell your computer to go to sleep, it will turn off the monitor, stop the disk drives, and preserve its current state into memory. When you will return back, just press any key on your keyboard or touch your mouse and your computer quickly wakes up, and you’re precisely where you left off.

Hibernate Mode

But in the case, you’re going to be away for a longer period of time from your computer, but will be coming back comparatively soon? This is when you should go for the setting named hibernate mode. You can Think of hibernating as a deeper state of sleep. In hibernate mode your state is saved. Also, your computer’s monitor is shut off, and hard disks are stopped. But a major difference between sleep and hibernate modes is power consumption. When a computer is in sleep mode, it is basically in a very low power state and can wake up very quickly. While in hibernate mode computer is turned off after saving its state, so it isn’t using any power. So it will take longer to warm up.

One of the most useful tips, that you should keep in mind is always saving your existing work before taking your computer into sleep or hibernate modes. Sometimes it happens that the computer will fail to wake up and, of course, in this case, you are going to lose any unsaved data. Laptop owners should also remember that sleep mode uses power and so, will ultimately drain the power from the battery.