One of my favorite features on the two laptops I’ve owned is the “resume” feature. You press a button or slide a little switch, and the computer goes into a kind of sleep mode – the screen goes dark, the hard drive stops spinning, etc. – but without fully shutting down. When you press the button again, the machine starts right up without re-booting, and lets you resume working on whatever you were working on before – the software just picks up where it left off. It’s such a handy feature.
My question is, are any desktop computers made with such a feature? (By this, I mean the monitor and ALL the mechanical stuff shut down, but you can still “resume” without re-booting – preferably all at the touch of a single button.)
Desktops running Win 95 or 98 have a “Suspend” mode that does pretty much the same thing. Most newer monitors “go to sleep” if the screen display doesn’t change within a certain time.
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
I thought essentially all monitors for desktops these days were “green” and could be set to go into sleep mode after not having been used for some set time, and that the machine itself, if having ATX power control, could be set to do similarly. Printers, scanners and whatever, however, would have to be shut down separately.
I have a surge protector strip that senses when my machine is shut down (draws less than a certain current), and then shuts down all of up to 3 peripherals I plug into it as well. The ATX sleep-mode power isn’t low enough to operate the strip though, so I stuck some extra relays in the ATX computer power supply so that I can shut the computer down completely with the Windows shut-down procedure, thus causing the strip to shut down all the perimpherals – monitor, printer and scanner. Having shut the computer all the way down, however, it requires booting up when turned on again. Maybe you can find a surge strip you can adjust to operate just on the drop in computer current from normal to sleep mode.
