What is the deference between sleep & hibernate ?

[westin123]

I never used the sleep & hibernate in windows 7 & I would like to know what they do & what is the deference between them. your help will be very much appreciated.

 

[zigzag3143]

Sleep is a power-saving state that allows a computer to quickly resume full-power operation (typically within several seconds) when you want to start working again. Putting your computer into the sleep state is like pausing a DVD player—the computer immediately stops what it’s doing and is ready to start again when you want to resume working.


Hibernation is a power-saving state designed primarily for laptops. While sleep puts your work and settings in memory and draws a small amount of power, hibernation puts your open documents and programs on your hard disk, and then turns off your computer. Of all the power-saving states in Windows, hibernation uses the least amount of power. On a laptop, use hibernation when you know that you won't use your laptop for an extended period and won't have an opportunity to charge the battery during that time.


http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Sleep-and-hibernation-frequently-asked-questions

 

[DavidE]

Take a look at this SF tutorial courtesy of Brink.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/153968-sleep-states-see-available-sleep-states.html

If you have questions after reading the tutorial, ask away...

Thanks, David

 

[Alejandro85]

Sleep, sometimes also called suspend, is a state where the computer is set in a low power consumption state, turns off screen and hard disks and just uses enough energy to keep the RAM alive and watch for certain events for waking up, but really it doesn't do any processing in the meantime. When you return to work, it restores its previous state from RAM and resumes operations, but if it's for some reason powered off or unplugged, all the work is lost and must do a fresh restart.

In hibernation, the computer is totally powered off, but prior all RAM contents are dumped in a system file, from where it can latter can be fully restored to its previous state. That way, you can even unplug, disassembly if you want, and when it's powered on, it will not do a normal bootup, but instead will read its working state from disk and resume where it was.

While both are similar, sleep is more suited for short interruptions of work, when power off would take too much time to justify, but you want a quick resume latter. Hibernation is better when you leave at night for example, the next day when you come back Windows will be in the exact same state as when you left, and with a faster boot time.

 

[seavixen32]

"Sleep is a power-saving state that allows a computer to quickly resume full-power operation (typically within several seconds) when you want to start working again. Putting your computer into the sleep state is like pausing a DVD player: The computer immediately stops what it’s doing and is ready to start again when you want to resume working.

Hibernation is a power-saving state designed primarily for laptops. While sleep puts your work and settings in memory and draws a small amount of power, hibernation puts your open documents and programs on your hard disk, and then turns off your computer. Of all the power-saving states in Windows, hibernation uses the least amount of power. On a laptop, use hibernation when you know that you won’t use your laptop for an extended period and won't have an opportunity to charge the battery during that time.

Hybrid sleep is designed primarily for desktop computers. Hybrid sleep is a combination of sleep and hibernate—it puts any open documents and programs in memory and on your hard disk, and then puts your computer into a low-power state so that you can quickly resume your work. That way, if a power failure occurs, Windows can restore your work from your hard disk. When hybrid sleep is turned on, putting your computer into sleep automatically puts your computer into hybrid sleep. Hybrid sleep is typically turned on by default on desktop computers."

Source: Windows Online Help