System standby, hibernation, sleep differences and advantages and disadvantages

In Windows Vista, where standby, hibernation, and so on have been joined early, a new pattern called sleep has been added to it, but many people are accustomed to shutting it down completely without using a computer. In fact, the full use of these models, we can not only save power consumption, but also in the shortest possible time to restore the system to normal working state.

These three modes are defined as follows:

Standby (Standby)

After switching the system to this mode, in addition to memory, the power of other computer devices will be interrupted, only memory depends on the power to maintain the data (because the memory is volatile, as long as the power loss, the data will not be). This way, when you want to recover, you can revert directly to the standby state. This mode is not completely power-hungry, so if there is an exception (for example, a power outage) in standby, the next time you can only reboot, the unsaved data will be lost before standby. But this mode of recovery is the fastest, generally within five seconds can be restored.

Hibernate (Hibernate)

When you switch the system to this mode, the system automatically shifts all of the data in memory to a dormant file on your hard disk, and then cuts power to all devices. This allows the system to read the contents of the hibernation file directly into memory from the hard disk and revert to the state before hibernation. This mode is completely free of power, so it is not afraid to sleep after the exception, but the cost is a piece and physical memory of the same size of hard disk space (fortunately, now the hard drive has been across the TB level, large-capacity hard drives are cheaper). This mode of recovery is slower, depending on the size of the memory and hard drive speed, generally 1 minutes or more, or even longer.

Sleeping (Sleep)

is a new mode in Windows Vista that combines all the benefits of standby and hibernation. After switching the system to sleep, the system will dump all of the data in memory to the hibernation file on the hard disk (this is like hibernation), and then turn off power to all devices except memory, leaving the data in memory still maintained (this is similar to standby). This way, when we want to recover, if the power supply does not occur during sleep, can be recovered directly from the data in memory (like standby), but if the power supply is abnormal during sleep, the data in memory is lost and can be recovered from the hard drive (like hibernation), but only slowly. In any case, this pattern does not result in data loss.

Because of the many benefits of sleep, the power button on the Windows Vista Start menu will switch the system to sleep mode by default. So we can make full use of this new function, after all, recover from the sleep state, faster than starting from scratch much faster. and sleep mode is not always carried out, if the system into sleep mode after a period of time (specific time can be set) has not been awakened, then will automatically be turned into hibernation, and turn off the power to the memory, further saving energy.