shut down vs hibernate

[pinkfloyd4ever]

Whats better for a laptop when not in use, to completely shut down or put in hibernate?

I had a friend tell me to put it in hibernate because it is easier overall on the hard drive vs. doing full restarts.

[pureinsanity]

That's a good question. But if your friend is saying its bad for it. That is kinda like saying you're going to leave your car on because its hard on the starter starting your car?

I might have to do some research.

The only benefit I really see off first basis is not having to boot up your computer every time.

[BobT]

My home PC operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium and that doesn't support hibernation mode. What it does support is sleep mode. My user's manual suggests that computers are designed to be running 24/7. However, it also says that it is beneficial to shut down and restart periodically because this will clear some software cache files that can get overly large. I created a scheduled task that automatically shuts down my PC every Wednesday after 3:00pm.

There is also the issue of power consumption. My system (PC and monitor) is rated at over 300w when running. That's potentially 8KwH per day if I am running a screen saver. At $.09/KwH that calculates to potentially about $22.00 per month. In sleep mode my system consumes less than 4w (3.8w rated). That’s only 1% of the power used running a screen saver. I don’t use screen savers anymore. Instead I created a power scheme that turns off my monitor after 3 minutes of idle time, turns off my hard drive after 5 minutes of idle time, and puts my PC into sleep mode after 20 minutes of idle time. I almost never have to wait for my PC to reboot. Just a simple movement of my mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard wakes my PC in a matter of seconds.

Using sleep mode also allows my PC to run certain scheduled maintenance programs during the night such as software upgrades, defragging, and malware scans.

Every once in a while I have to restart my PC from scratch because it automatically shut down during the night after some software updates or of course because of my scheduled shut down on Wednesdays. Other than that it’s always ready to go.

[spearchucker]

Bob, Vista Home Premium is capable of hibernate if it is enabled. I have used it before. It must be disabled in the Power options control panel on your PC.

Hibernate is no different than a full restart as far as the hard drive is concerned. Hibernate just saves your RAM contents to the hard drive and essentially shuts down. When you start up again it restores the RAM contents and you are back where you left off after you went to hibernate.

Sleep will power down pretty much everything with the exception of your RAM. Power consumption difference between power off and sleep on a modern PC is negligible.

I used sleep with Windows 7 on all my laptops and desktops to save power when I am not using them. You can be at the login prompt from sleep in 1 or 2 seconds versus 30-60 from a full power up from shutdown. I have measured sleep power consumption versus a full shutdown on my desktop and laptop and they are the same, so no measurable power savings from shutdown.

Some older hardware drivers had issued with sleep and hibernate mode, but if you have everything up to date you are generally good to go. Modern hard drives are a lot more reliable and cheaper (price wise)than older ones and will probably be obsolete before you wear one out from power cycling it. Laptops are made for power saving.

I would recommend sleep unless you are going to pack up the laptop and travel with it. A restart is a good thing to do every couple days just to clear out any carp from poorly designed programs, etc.

[pinkfloyd4ever]

alright thanks for the info everyone

[upnorth]

The standard power settings for a laptop powers down the laptop after a fairly short period of time and just moving the mouse or tapping a key will spin it back up. So sleep or hibernate is not going to do much more with the hard drive than that.

Older laptops with XP service pack 1 had some issues with sleep and hibernate where they wouldn't come out of it. It would require a complete power down and in some case going as far as unplugging and removing the battery. That could be what your friend said was bad for the hard drive.

[BobT]

I just did a quick search for hibernate on my PC and you're right that it is or in my case was available. Turns out that the first time I ran Disk Cleanup it disabled the hibernate and hybrid sleep functions. I can get it reactivated if I want but sleep has worked fine for me over the past couple years.

Looks like I learned something today.

Thanks,

[spearchucker]

If you have hibernate enabled there will be a file on your hard drive names hiberfil.sys that is the same size as the amount of RAM on your system. File is usually in the Windows folder or root.