This is odd. In Win XP, went into Power Options and set System Standby to take effect after 15 minutes of idle. I did **not ** check the Enable Hibernation.
It goes into Standby all right when it should, but as I understand it, touching a key or moving the mouse is suppose to bring it back. Only in hibernation should you have to hit the power button, right?
Anyhoo, when it goes into standby, the only way to bring it back is to hit the power button on the box. I don’t even dare try fooling around with hibernation.
Is this common on some systems? If not, what’s wrong? It’s no big deal, easy enough to do, just puzzled.
The difference is the power usage. Hibernation actually turns the machine off, resulting in no power consumption, and requires a brief “resuming Windows” period. Standby, on the other hand, is still on, just sleeping and using very little power. Most PCs lock out the keyboard and mouse and only power up from standby with the power button, to avoid accidental reactivation (and thus even higher power usage).
One clue here is that “Standby” is one of the options when you hit Start > Turn Off Computer (the others are Turn Off and Restart).
it sounds like what you really want is an idle state with the display off and the HD powered down, where the system will reactivate with the touch of a key or the mouse. If so, you can do that in power settings – just don’t tell it to Standby, because it thinks you want it to go to sleep until deliberately awoken.
Basically, Standby shuts down your monitor and hard drive (and whatever else is running) but keeps power to your memory (RAM). When you reactivate the PC the system should come back the way you left it and presumably does so faster and with less power drain than booting from a complete power off.
In order for Windows to best manage Standby mode the hardware needs to be ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) compliant. If something is not then the results can be unpredictable. It may be (not saying it is) that your laptop has some non-compliant hardware so using the mouse to turn it back on is not recognized.
Hibernation on the other hand is a complete power off state. The computer writes what is in RAM when it goes into hibernation to the harddrive then powers itself off. When the system comes back on it will read this info and restore the desktop to how it was when it was powered off (open files, programs, etc).
Personally I find both amazingly useless and prone to causing more trouble than they are worth. In theory everything comes back faster than if you did a cold boot. In practice I find the computer flails around so much getting itself back into shape that faster is a relative thing. I disable standby and hibernation as a matter of course on all PCs I am responsible for and just enable power saving things like turn off the monitor. If you are leaving your PC long enough to think hbernation is a good idea then just turn it off (IMO).
My PC is set to Standby after 20 minutes, and moving the mouse or touching a key wakes it up. I always standby my home PC and work notebook PC. It’s typically weeks between reboots. And Whack-a-Mole, it’s a huge time saver, like 20 seconds vs. five minutes.
I got a new HP desktop a few weeks ago, and both Standby and Hibernation seem to be too darned sensitive to mouse movement, tiny earthquakes, heavy treading on the floor, or who knows.
I’ve just been turning the thing completely off, but I dislike the irritation of simple things that should work, but don’t. (Right, my computer is possibly not my greatest problem. My attitude, on the other hand… but never mind.)
So, is there anything to be done to make these work better?
The wake from sleep devices are set in the BIOS, right? I just had to replace the mobo on my XP box, and the first thing I did upon boot was go into the BIOS settings, and from there I noticed I could turn off all of the dang wake-on-USB settings that were there. Once XP got done reconfiguring its hardware (two or three boots), sleep worked better than ever! The FAN actually sleeps in sleep mode! The Soundblaster-16 works after waking up! My green power LED has turned into a RED power LED. (If anyone can explain that one, it’d be appreciated.)
Kind of a related question - ever since I connected to a wireless network, my computer will refuse to go into hibernation as long as the computer is connected. Is this normal, and is there a workaround?