in a laptop, whats the difference between setting up your laptop to 'hibernate', 'sleep', or 'standby'?

Question

and which is the most suitable in a general case?

Answer 1

giving u all the cases ....

Idel for 5-10 min.
(leave it and it goes to ScreenSaver mode automatically)

Idel for 30-60 min.
(press 'sleep' button for standby mode
and use 'wakeup' button to return to normal mode)

Idel for more then 5-10 hrs
(use hibernate)

Idel for more then 24 hrs
(use shutdown)


Chucks answer is informative then mine but my answer is more practical ... :-) now its up to u !!

can't we get 50-50% points ?

Answer 2

I think if you just hit standby, it will come back on by just clicking your screen
in the "mouse" area or a key [like the space bar]. However, I believe your
unit will automatically go to hibernate after 30 mins or an hour [I'm unsure]
In hibernate, the unit has shut almost down and you must hit your "on" button
briefly, but when it comes on it will automatically show all the programs you
were using before and you can continue as though you had left for only a
moment. Obviously you would be saving power and thus possibly some electronic components life span in perhaps the screen or unit. i would just
use standby and test the above for 30mins or 1 hr + to see if it goes into hibernate [you MAY have a setting for this]. that's convenient, but if yours doesn't do this, you may want to set it for hibernate each time. Good luck and I hope this helps. Greg [PS: I think sleep is same as hibernate]

Answer 3

i never understood the concept of standby and sleep.

if your computer is fast, put it on hibernate instead of shutting it down...

hibernate saves all information in the memory in the harddisk so that you dont loose any information, positions of the windows, and running programs.

im not sure with the other two:
standby or sleep cuts the power off the other parts of the computer but it is still on.

hibernate shuts down the computer entirely but as i have said, saves the "current state" of the computer

Answer 4

same name of 3`s

Answer 5

all 3 are pretty much the same thing, just different names