Hibernation v Standby

[Stefan Bruckel]

Is it the same thing or are there differences?

If there is a difference, why chose one over the other?

Thank you for your comment.

[Kyocera]

Standby use a little bit more battery power than hibernate, other than that not sure.

[cj3209]

Correct me if I'm wrong but Standby continues to draw power and maintains its current state. My old Dell i8000 almost burned up as I stored it in a notebook bag while on Standby b/c it was still drawing power and hence it continued to generate heat while in my bag.

Hibernation actually stores the current state onto the hard drive so that when the notebook is turned on again, it goes back to the saved state faster than if you had just turned the notebook off. It doesn't draw any power.

[kimx]

Standby keeps the RAM active, while hibernate saves the content of the RAM to te harddrive.

[Scratch]

I rarely turn my machines off and I tend to prefer Standby over Hibernation.

I finish my day at my desk, close the lid and take the machine home where it's dropped onto a dock on my home desk and kicked on to finsih up the days tasks.

I've found Hibernate to take too long to kick in when I want to hit the road and a time to recover at the other end. Since my T'Pad spends very little time in the bag unless I'm traveling I've found Standby to be more than adequate. It will last about 4 days in that Standby state, so I'm sure that Hibernate would conserve even more power. It also reserves a space on your HDD equivalent to installed RAM + %age. I don't like that reqm't or activity on my C partition where I try to limit activity and space that I prefer to allocate to my data partition.

My CAD applications don't do well with Hibernation, but seem to handle Standby well. Regardless, I make certain to Save before I close the lid.

I've not run into any heat problems with Standby and wouldn't expect to unless something brought the machine out of Standby while in the bag. I always disable the "bring the machine out of standby" abilities for any driver that offers it.

[Hamid]

Standby keeps the RAM active and will consume power. From what I have seen in calculating the required power supply for a PC, each 128 MB of DDR-DIMM requires 10W. An AGP graphic card cinsumes about 30W, an IDE-HDD about 112W, and a DVD R/RW drive about 13W. (Just to give you an overview for comparison)

IMO, Hibernation will not save you any time if the amount of RAM is more than 1 GB (even for 1GB of RAM there are some arguements). This is mainly because an optimized OS will load faster than copying 1 1GB file into RAM.

HTH,
Hamid

[christopher_wolf]

Just to clarify, it is not an exact copy of whatever is in RAM to the HDD during hibernation or vice versa during resume. So it really doesn't matter how much RAM you have, the OS just compresses the data in it along with an allocated array of references to the locations where any given block of data was stored in. So if you have 2GB and are only using 128MB of it, you only need to worry about putting that 128MB onto the HDD and then restoring that much upon a hibernate resume.

[Hamid]

I guess I didn't explain it correctly, Yes, hibernation doesn't make a blind copy of RAM.

But I personally use hibernation a lot, and a lot of times I don't close my windows, browsers, even office applications (althiugh I save before hiberating) ...... I resume later on by coming back from hibernation. I can't trust stanby that much

Basically systems with 2GB of RAM, are not most of time at 128MB of RAM usage

[christopher_wolf]

Indeed; I have used Standby or Hibernation most of the time when I don't feel like shutting down the entire computer.

And, no, you did a pretty good job of explaining it quite corrctly.


My post was in regards to making sure that nobody went ahead an assumed that an entire copy was made of the current memory image and then stored as has been deemed in the past.

Cheers

[Stefan Bruckel]

Thank you all for your discussion. Bottom line appears to be that stand by and hibernate are somewhat similar, with stand by being possibly a little bit faster at the expense of added power consumptions, whereas hibernate is similar to a complete system shut down but avoids the driver reboot (system is simply restored to exact prior setting memory wise). Got it.

Now, related question... few of us enjoy the 2 minute process of rebooting and waiting for all the drivers to load... most of us use either hibernate or stand by as the "default" system shut down when transporting our machines etc.

Now, other than program install that requires a reboot, when do you shut the system down to "clean out" any memory issues etc? Once a week? Once a month? Never? Personally, I've shut it down only when it behaves strange, slow, or otherwise abnormal... any reason to do it more frequently?

[astro]

Before you go on, should also point out that if you don't use hibernate then you can reclaim the space required (same size as your physical RAM) for the hibernate file (C:\hiberfil.sys -- it's hidden). You can do this by disabling hibernate in the Power Properties (right click on your battery icon).

[pianowizard]

Before you go on, should also point out that if you don't use hibernate then you can reclaim the space required (same size as your physical RAM) for the hibernate file (C:\hiberfil.sys -- it's hidden).

Yep, that's why I always turn it off. I turn off System Restore too, also to save space.