Benfits of leaving sleep on in Windows 8?

[Endymion FRS]

I always turned sleep off in Windows 7, but now that I upgraded to W8, I am rethinking that. Is there any benefit to leaving it on? It was kinda neat coming back to my computer after a trip and not hearing any fans until I woke it up.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I'd say why not? it saves power and supposedly wakes up quicker than 7.

 

[Endymion FRS]

How does sleep work with programs in the background? Say I have Steam downloading/installing a game, and my computer goes to sleep. Does it keep downloading? Or does sleep not happen until it finishes? Same with if a game needs patched, will it wake up if it detects Steam needs to patch?

 

[Nothinman]

It shouldn't go to sleep until it's done because S3 sleep suspends all programs.

 

[dagamer34]

How does sleep work with programs in the background? Say I have Steam downloading/installing a game, and my computer goes to sleep. Does it keep downloading? Or does sleep not happen until it finishes? Same with if a game needs patched, will it wake up if it detects Steam needs to patch?

Only two things will trigger a computer to wake up: a wake-on-LAN (WOL) packet and an upcoming Windows Media Center recording.

The things you list should prevent a computer from going to sleep though until a task is finished.

 

[lopri]

Even though I use S3 24/7 I shut my systems off when I go to a trip. Power outage can do funny things when you're asleep. 😱

 

[Endymion FRS]

Only two things will trigger a computer to wake up: a wake-on-LAN (WOL) packet and an upcoming Windows Media Center recording.

The things you list should prevent a computer from going to sleep though until a task is finished.

Alright, cool. What about torrents? How does that work if they are continuous?

 

[ViRGE]

Alright, cool. What about torrents? How does that work if they are continuous?

It depends on how exactly you are configured, but generally it means your computer will never go to sleep.

 

[mikeymikec]

Even though I use S3 24/7 I shut my systems off when I go to a trip. Power outage can do funny things when you're asleep. 😱

With hybrid sleep the session is saved to disk, so a power outage doesn't seriously affect your stuff.

I typically use sleep mode at the end of each day on my desktop PC, so I can just press a button and it is ready to use in about 5 seconds.

One thing I would advise however is that Windows will sometimes wake the computer in the small hours to install updates and then shut down, so leaving something open/running when the computer goes to sleep can be perilous. I typically close all programs before putting my computer in to sleep mode overnight because of this.

I've resumed Windows (it was in hybrid sleep) after a power outage. The computer resumed as if it was in hibernation, the only weird thing was that it was quite sluggish for about 10 minutes after resuming (and this doesn't normally happen for me if I intentionally hibernate the computer, so my guess is that hybrid sleep saves only absolutely necessary data from mem to disk and skips cached data).