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Apr 2, 2024 · Step 1: Understand Your Needs. Consider how long you’ll be away from your computer and how quickly you need to resume work. If you’re only stepping away for a short break, sleep mode might be the better choice, as it allows for a faster wake-up time. If you’re leaving your computer for an extended period or want to save more power ...
- What's the Difference Between Sleep and Hibernate?
- Which One Uses More Energy?
- The Best Tech Newsletter Around
Before we dive into energy consumption, let's talk about why these two modes exist separately. Neither mode fully shuts down your PC, but they do very different things.
Sleep is essentially a "low-power mode." The PC's state is kept in memory, but the other parts of the PC are shut down. This is what allows it to very quickly resume where you left off when your turn the PC back on. Sleep mode is sort of like a light nap.
Hibernate saves the current state to the hard drive instead of the memory. When you power the PC back on, it loads that state back to the memory. Since the state is saved to the hard drive, the PC can essentially shut down completely while still resuming where you left off when it's powered on. It does take a little longer to boot up from hibernating than sleep, though.
Sleep mode should typically be used if you're stepping away for a short time, whereas hibernate is better for situations like going to sleep for the night. Both save more energy than keeping the PC on when you're not using it.
You may have already guessed from the previous descriptions, but hibernating does save more energy than sleep. Is it a considerable difference? There's only one way to find out.
A PC that is hibernating supposedly uses about the same amount of power as one that's completely shut down. As mentioned, that's why it takes longer to boot up. While both sleep and hibernate are still technically powered on, sleep mode is more "awake" than hibernate. That takes more power.
To test this, I plugged my PC into a smart plug that has a power meter feature. When the PC is powered on, I tracked it using anywhere from around 40W to over 100W. In sleep mode, that dropped down to around 4W. Hibernate dropped it all the way down to 0.2W and even 0W.
Related: PSA: Don't Shut Down Your Computer, Just Use Sleep (or Hibernation)
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Jul 20, 2016 · Select Choose what the power button does, and then select Change settings that are currently unavailable. Under Shutdown settings, select the Hibernate checkbox (if it's available), and then select Save changes. Now you'll be able to happily hibernate your PC. Note that OLD PCs don't have a hibernate option.
Jul 10, 2017 · Hibernate: Your PC saves its current state to your hard drive, essentially dumping the contents of its memory to a file. When you boot up the PC, it loads the previous state from your hard drive back to memory. This allows you to save your computer's state, including all your open programs and data, and come back to it later.
Select Start , and then select Power > Hibernate. Press the Windows logo key + X on your keyboard, and then select Shut down or sign out > Hibernate. You can also set closing the lid or pressing the power or sleep buttons to hibernate your PC, if you so desire, using the same directions in To set your PC so it goes to sleep when you close the ...
Sep 14, 2013 · Hibernation on desktop is also useful: it allows the computer to restore its state even if a power failure occurs. Combined with suspend-to-RAM for fast resume, this is probably the best combination for a desktop (Windows' hybrid sleep option does this). – Andrey Vihrov.
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Apr 12, 2023 · Key Takeaways. Sleep saves your current work to RAM, and your computer continues to draw a little bit of power while in sleep mode. Hibernate saves your current work to your hard drive or SSD, and consumes no power. Windows provides several options for conserving power when you are not using your PC. These options include Sleep, Hibernate, and ...
