Legit Reviews

Are Stand By and Hibernation Modes hard on your system?

MoBo - DG965SS
Yesterday I accidentally pressed a button on my keyboard that put my system into either Stand By or Hibernation.
I didn't know I had this button.....never pressed it before.

Windows XP displayed "Preparing to Shut Down" and my machine went to sleep.
No fans.....nothing.
It woke up with a move of the mouse.

However, when it woke up, the Intel System monitor put a warning on my desktop that my CPU fan was too slow.

Thanks,
Bill

My systems have Vista, but it doesn't seem to have hurt anything in the past several months. The warning was likely just because the fans were not up to full seed yet.

I took a closer look at my keyboard and the button is marked "sleep".
Can't hardly see it, it white letters on a silver background.

I noticed WinXp has all kinds of Power Options. I'm going do some reasearch and see what settings are best and let Windows put my system to sleep.

Thanks again,
Bill

The SLEEP mode for power management is a tricky option.

For some systems, it works great in the default mode. While in others, it isn't all to well on the HDD's.

From my own experience, I've lost two HDDs in the past. Both times the drives had the FAT table data scrambled up. What a pain it was to correct it and retrieve the data to save. Once saved, re-formating the drives and loading the OS back on saved everything. But it was a headache anyways. Of course these HDDs were IDE/PATA technology and not SATA types.

My son uses the SLEEP/Hibernate mode on his HP Pavilion desktop. It hasn't hiccuped at all for the six months he's had it now.

So, for my system, the monitor and fans turn off while the HDDs and one little fan remain running with the PSU. When the mouse is wiggled, the monitor and fans power up again.

I never experienced any hardware problems because of using Sleep (as far as one can tell). With my D975XBX and Vista it took a while until BIOS and drivers were working properly to wakeup (using 2 graphic cards).

Vista has a nice feature called "Hybrid Sleep". When you sleep your machine, it first writes a hibernation file.
If you move your mouse (or whatever you have configured to wakeup your machine) it instantly wakes up.
If you loose power while sleeping your machine resumes from hibernation.

The only drawback: sleeping takes a while. Thus hybrid sleep is not so useful for notebooks where I use sleep very often.
For safety Vista hibernates notebooks automatically when the battery gets low, even wakes up from sleep to do this.