Do I need to put vista to sleep

[fr0zenmon]

before i close the lid/hatch. What happens if i just close the cover and carry my laptop. can my hd get damaged?

What is the best and fastest way to pause work without shutting down?

[mgo]

before i close the lid/hatch. What happens if i just close the cover and carry my laptop. can my hd get damaged?

What is the best and fastest way to pause work without shutting down?

Just make sure your power settings are configured to have the computer go into Sleep when the lid is closed. You will see a little half moon when it goes into sleep.

You can check the power settings in Control Panel. In Sleep the hard drive is stopped and parked.

However, some users report that their computers wake up out of sleep while the lid is closed or while in a backpack, etc. This can lead to overheating. Mine will wake from Sleep if I remove the external USB mouse while it is in sleep when using Vista, but not when using XP.

Check yours and make sure it does not misbehave.

More secure than sleep and faster than shut down is Hibernate. Hibernate with Vista takes much longer than it did with XP, but it will absolutely not wake up until you hit the power switch.

[K0LO]

...However, some users report that their computers wake up out of sleep while the lid is closed or while in a backpack, etc. This can lead to overheating. Mine will wake from Sleep if I remove the external USB mouse while it is in sleep when using Vista, but not when using XP...

Mine did this too until going into Device Manager and unchecking "Allow this device to wake the computer" on the Power Management tab for the Mouse.

Vista has also shortened the amount of time that a PC will stay awake after coming out of sleep mode. If there is no user activity for 2 minutes it will go back to sleep again. This interval used to be 5 minutes in XP, but I also noticed that XP SP3 changed this to 2 min.

[mgo]

[quote="<snip> this too until going into Device Manager and unchecking "Allow this device to wake the computer" on the Power Management tab for the Mouse.

Vista has also shortened the amount of time that a PC will stay awake after coming out of sleep mode. If there is no user activity for 2 minutes it will go back to sleep again. This interval used to be 5 minutes in XP, but I also noticed that XP SP3 changed this to 2 min.

Ha! Mine will go back into Hibernate (coming out of Hibernate not sleep) unless I do something on the keyboard or mouse within about 15 seconds with Vista. Happens on five different ThinkPads. That never happened in XP.

Thanks for the mouse tip. And, no, I didn't realize that Windows would go -back- to sleep with no action on the user's part. Good idea, really.....should help prevent spurious wake-ups in the backpack, I suppose.

[K0LO]

..Ha! Mine will go back into Hibernate (coming out of Hibernate not sleep) unless I do something on the keyboard or mouse within about 15 seconds with Vista...

That's right; I remember you posting about that previously. I would check here but I've disabled hibernation on my Vista machines. As it turns out, it took the bloody machine almost a minute to resume from hibernation. Curiously, it only takes 18 seconds to boot, so that kind of makes hibernation useless.

[sliverstorm]

18 second boot time? What magic are you working? O.o