What is "Standby"?

[Muse]

I was just going to leave my computer for 1/2 hour and thought I'd like to turn off the monitor. I don't see how to do this other than turn it off, but I thought there must be a way to make it instantly go to sleep. I didn't find that but tried Stand By in my Windows 2000 SP3, which did do this. What exactly IS Stand By? Does it spin down the HDs? What are the pros and cons and links to something that would explain to me my various power saving, etc. options are appreciated...

 

[NogginBoink]

Standby is not perfectly defined. I believe it is the ACPI S3 state, but S3 has no concrete meaning... it's up to each hardware vendor to decide what their hardware will do when put into S3.

In most cases, I believe that Standby is suspend-to-RAM. The OS state is stored in RAM and the mobo keeps power to the RAM while shutting off everything else.

If power goes off, you lose your data, unlike hibernation, which is suspend-to-disk.

Of course, my interpretation might be totally off base and I might be blowing smoke, so take this with a reasonable dose of skepticism.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: NogginBoink
Standby is not perfectly defined. I believe it is the ACPI S3 state, but S3 has no concrete meaning... it's up to each hardware vendor to decide what their hardware will do when put into S3.

In most cases, I believe that Standby is suspend-to-RAM. The OS state is stored in RAM and the mobo keeps power to the RAM while shutting off everything else.

If power goes off, you lose your data, unlike hibernation, which is suspend-to-disk.

Of course, my interpretation might be totally off base and I might be blowing smoke, so take this with a reasonable dose of skepticism.

OK, thanks. My MB is MSI Ultra2. It seems to work OK. I generally save things frequently and will try to make a point of saving any open app's data before going into standby. Funny, it doesn't seem to want to wake up sometimes. I hit Control Alt Delete, and then a 2nd time and my login dialog comes up and it wakes up. It does shut down the monitor, and I guess it saves power in general. I'll check it out with my power meter.

 

[cleverhandle]

Isn't there a Power Management section of Display Settings that will handle just DPMS states without all the other standby stuff? I'm not at a Windows box right now to check, but that seems familiar.