How to correctly understand the Windows XP system standby, Hibernate, sleep

People who have been using Windows for such a long time should have known that the Windows operating system has standby, hibernate, and so on, and Windows 7 has added a new mode called sleep, but many people are accustomed to shutting it down completely when they are not using the computer. In fact, taking full advantage of these models, we can not only save power consumption, but also can restore the system to normal working condition in the shortest possible time. Here is a detailed description of the differences and advantages and disadvantages of these three modes

These three modes are defined as follows:

Standby (Standby)

After switching the system to this mode, the power of the computer's other devices will be interrupted in addition to the memory, and only the memory relies on the power to maintain the data (because the memory is volatile and the data is lost as long as the power is lost). This allows you to restore directly to pre-standby state when you want to recover. This mode is not completely non-powered, so if the power supply in standby abnormal (such as power outage), then the next time can only reboot, so the unsaved data before standby is lost. But this mode of recovery is the fastest, generally within five seconds can be restored.

Hibernate (Hibernate)

When the system is switched to this mode, the system automatically dumps all the data in memory to a hibernation file on the hard disk, and then shuts off the power to all devices. When recovering, the system reads the contents of the dormant file directly into memory from the hard disk and reverts to the state before hibernation. This mode does not consume electricity at all, so it is not afraid to power up after hibernation, but at the cost of a piece of hard disk space that is as large as the physical memory (fortunately, the hard drive is now across the TB level, and the high-capacity drives are getting cheaper). This mode of recovery is slower, depending on the size of the memory and the speed of the hard disk, generally take about 1 minutes, or even longer.

Sleeping (Sleep)

is the new mode in Windows Vista, which combines all the benefits of standby and hibernation. After switching the system to sleep, the system dumps all of the in-memory data into the hibernation file on the hard disk (which is similar to hibernation), and then turns off the power of all devices except memory, keeping the in-memory data still (similar to standby). This way, when we want to recover, if the power supply is not abnormal during sleep, it can be recovered directly from 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 disk (like hibernation), but it is slower. However, this mode does not result in data loss.

Because sleep features have so many advantages, the power button on the Windows Vista Start menu switches the system to sleep mode by default. So we can make the most of this new feature, after all, recovering from sleep is much faster than starting from scratch. and sleep mode is not always going on, if the system into sleep mode after a period of time (the specific time can be set) is not awakened, it will automatically be turned into hibernation, and power off the memory, further saving energy.