You asked about the difference between standby and hibernate.  Standby or
suspend means that the disks, monitor and everything but enough energy to
keep the RAM intact is shutdown.  Hibernate means that the contents of RAM
and some other settings are saved to the hard disk so that the CPU can
also be shutdown.  In either way, when you resume the computer should be
in the same state it was when you invoked power management.  The
documentation with my laptop suggests using suspend when you know your
power supply won't be interrupted and hibernate when it might be.

Fred Langa has a good Information Week article on this.  Check out
"InformationWeek > Fred Langa > Langa Letter: To Sleep, Perchance To
Hibernate... > September 27, 2002" at URL
http://informationweek.com/story/IWK20020927S0028.

Christopher

Christopher J Chaltain
[log in to unmask]




Stu Turk <[log in to unmask]>
Sent by: "VICUG-L: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List"
<[log in to unmask]>
01/31/2003 03:18 PM
Please respond to Stu Turk


        To:     [log in to unmask]
        cc:
        Subject:        Re: [VICUG-L] Shutting off computer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Meyers, Judith" <[log in to unmask]>


> Our IT person highly recommends shutting off the computer at night.  =
> When the computer is running, the C drive continues to spin.  The C =
> drive will break down more quickly, if the computer is constantly left =
> on. =20

   That has been the standard recommendation for most computers for some
time now for most computers.  But now many or possibly most newer
computers
have a feature to shut down the hard drive after a specific amount of time
with no activity.  It also may depend on what program are running. Windows
XP, for example, seems to have several shut down options (I still don't
know
the difference between Stand-by and Hybernate.)
     I have a 24 hour computer bulletin board (BBS) that is running on a
computer that, except for power failures, has been running continuously
for
more than four years without any problem.  So, it seems to depend on the
computer  and how it is set up and whether a power saving or automatic
shutdown feature has been turned on.


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[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
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