What is the downside of hibernate?

[Smartazz]

I usually let my pc hibernate, what's the downside, if any?

 

[Thorny]

You have to wait an extra 5 seconds for it to wake up. Oh, and my internet loses connection and takes and extra 5 seconds on top of that. Lets not forget that instead of being able to wake it up with my keyboard, I have to open the door to my case and actually hit the button to wake it, that takes maybe 3 seconds.

Its horrible really, but I like the silence of no fans or HDD's, so I still hibernate

 

[Smartazz]

When I put this computer in standby the fans are still spinning, is this normal?

 

[Thorny]

Originally posted by: Smartazz
When I put this computer in standby the fans are still spinning, is this normal?

Standby doesn't stop the fans, thats why I use hibernate. I think there may be different standby/powersaving modes available through bios though, I don't have much knowledge in this area.

 

[her34]

Originally posted by: Smartazz
When I put this computer in standby the fans are still spinning, is this normal?

there are different levels of standby. usually the better and more feature rich motherboards support standby with all fans off.


standby is nicer because it's instantaneous wake up. but power interruption will cause you to lose everything, so for desktops hibernate is safer. this doesn't matter so much for laptops because they have batteries and you can set it to automatically hibernate when battery power gets low.

vista will introduce a new option which is hybrid of standby and hibernate. think of it as standby where everything is stored in ram, but at same time OS will store data on hdd like hibernate. so if you resume, it will be instantenous like standby because OS will call data from ram. if power happens to go out, it will be like hibernate and OS will call data from hdd.


oh, and biggest downside to hibernate is that the more ram you have the longer it takes to resume. something i think will get progressively worse as people start to have 2gb or 4gb of ram

 

[Smartazz]

alright thanks, so I use a UPS and I put it in standby, if the power goes out the data will remain safe right?

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Smartazz
alright thanks, so I use a UPS and I put it in standby, if the power goes out the data will remain safe right?

Absolutely not.

Hibernate writes the entire ram contents to a file on your hard drive (hiberfil.sys) and shuts the computer completely down. You could take your pc apart and ship every piece to another location and re-assemble it and power it back on and every document, email, whatever you were doing - would be there.

That's assuming that nothing gets destroyed in the shipping process. :Q

My notebook hibernates when the batt pack drops to 3% and I've actually had movies playing and when I plugged it in and resumed, the movie started playing exactly where it stopped!

 

[0roo0roo]

hibernate is safest yes. it uses the same power as when off basically. standby, there are different standby modes, each using less power, but its a mess from what i've seen, many pcs just won't go into a deep standby so its a waste of time, yes the fans and everything stays on laptops are pretty much the only things garranteed to reliably go into a deeper standby mode, no fans, no nothin. just a bit of battery sippin so you can't really leave it in ffor days and expect it to not each the battery. only advantage of standbyis very quick wake up.

 

[East17]

Well ... I hope nobody will be mad at me but I think that using Hibernate and StandBy is just being lazy ...

Come on people ... do a good , well optimised windows install , and windows will boot up in less than 30 seconds with no risks of loosing any data .

 

[0roo0roo]

well we do it because we don't want to close all our apps, esp if u really like multitasking and loading a buncha stuff up. sure you can save sessions and tabs, but it has to reload and all that nonsense. easier to just hibernate/standby and ony reboot when totally necessary

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn

Originally posted by: Smartazz
alright thanks, so I use a UPS and I put it in standby, if the power goes out the data will remain safe right?

Absolutely not.

Hibernate writes the entire ram contents to a file on your hard drive (hiberfil.sys) and shuts the computer completely down. You could take your pc apart and ship every piece to another location and re-assemble it and power it back on and every document, email, whatever you were doing - would be there.

That's assuming that nothing gets destroyed in the shipping process. :Q

My notebook hibernates when the batt pack drops to 3% and I've actually had movies playing and when I plugged it in and resumed, the movie started playing exactly where it stopped!

A PC in standby though with a UPS should be fine, shouldn't it? At least for several minutes, or however long the UPS will run.

Originally posted by: East17
Well ... I hope nobody will be mad at me but I think that using Hibernate and StandBy is just being lazy ...

Come on people ... do a good , well optimised windows install , and windows will boot up in less than 30 seconds with no risks of loosing any data .

Sure, but if you want to really have the computer do anything, and be ready for anything when it boots up, then it can take 2 minutes. I have mine set to load MBM5, Getright, AVG, Folding@Home, Task Manager, UPS monitoring program, NVMixer, OpenOffice Quickstarter, and a few other utilities.
So sure, a fresh Windows install will load extremely fast. Unfortunately, for heavy use, it might also prove extremely useless.
I personally can't stand doing Windows reinstalls. I spend the next few months discovering just how many small tweaks I make to my system to get it do behave the way I want. Firefox extensions, shell extensions, registry tweaks, codecs, all kinds of little things.

I do need a reinstall though. WMP can't find half the codecs it needs (even though it does always play the video then:confused, and going into Standby mode causes a quick reboot. The installation is getting close to 2 years old, and it's accumulated minor registry damage over that time.

 

[Smartazz]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
well we do it because we don't want to close all our apps, esp if u really like multitasking and loading a buncha stuff up. sure you can save sessions and tabs, but it has to reload and all that nonsense. easier to just hibernate/standby and ony reboot when totally necessary

Some people just leave their computers on all day if they're multitasking.

 

[Rubycon]

If the UPS service is set to hibernate the PC at 50% (UPS) battery life, the chance of data loss in an un-attended shutdown is remote. Standby requires the PC to have power on in order to keep the ram refreshed. Lose this power and the pc shuts off taking any open stuff with it. This will happen if the blackout lasts longer than the batteries can power the UPS' inverter until they are depleted. The oil soap guy (Mr. Murphy) ALWAYS makes sure a power failure will last 110% of the battery power duration.

Hibernate is safer. On a notebook it's great to have it set when you close the cover. With my work quite often I have to immediately put the computer down and run somewhere. Closing a document takes too long - closing the lid and putting the notebook down works great. When I return I power back up and there's my work exactly as I left it. Rarely the hibernation recovery does fail and I have to delete the hibernate point and restart cold. The latest BIOS has fixed this to a point where I don't remember the last time that has happened and I close the lid at least a few times a day.