difference between hybernate and standby

[ITlover]

Can anyone please tell me the difference between hybernate and standby.

[freakitchen]

Standby spins down the hard drives to conserve power and turns off the screen - basically, running the system in the lowest power state it can. The system does remain on, and fans still spin (though they may decrease in speed if at all temperature-controlled).

Hibernate basically takes all the programs open in your RAM, saves the information to your hard disc, and shuts down the computer. When you next boot up, your desktop is restored as it was when you hibernated. This is good, as it cuts down on loading times quite a bit, but if you start using this instead of a proper shutdown, remember to physically restart windows once in a while, otherwise the OS can bog itself down.

[Lespaul20]

Actually if you put your system in to standby everything is shuts down including the fans. Only the RAM is powered therefore keeping your system in the state it was when you put it into standby.

Freakitchen is right about the Hibernate though.

More technical explanation:

S3 is called Suspend to RAM (STR) in the BIOS, Standby in versions of Windows through Windows XP and in some varieties of Linux, Sleep in Windows Vista and Mac OS X, although the ACPI specification mentions only the terms S3 and Sleep. In this state, main memory (RAM) is still powered, although it is almost the only component that is. Since the state of the operating system and all applications, open documents, etc. lies all in main memory, the user can resume work exactly where he/she left off—the main memory content when the computer comes back from S3 is the same as when it was put into S3. (The specification mentions that S3 is rather similar to S2, only that some more components are powered down in S3.) S3 has two advantages over S4; the computer resumes in about the time it takes the monitor to come on, secondly if any running applications (opened documents, etc) have private information in them, this will not be written to the disk. However, disk caches may be flushed to prevent data corruption in case the system doesn't wake up e.g. due to power failure. S4 is called Hibernation in Windows, Safe Sleep in Mac OS X, also known as Suspend to disk, although the ACPI specification mentions only the term S4 (main article: Hibernate (OS feature)). In this state, all content of main memory is saved to non-volatile memory such as a hard drive, preserving the state of the operating system, all applications, open documents etc. That means that after coming back from S4, the user can resume work where it was left off in much the same way as with S3. The difference between S4 and S3, apart from the added time of moving the main memory content to disk and back, is that a power loss of a computer in S3 makes it lose all data in main memory, including all unsaved documents, while a computer in S4 is unaffected. S4 is quite different from the other S states and actually resembles G2 Soft Off and G3 Mechanical Off more than it resembles S1–S3. A system that's in S4 can also be put in G3 (Mechanical Off) and still keep its S4 save state information, so that it can resume the operating state after getting back power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ower_Interface

[freakitchen]

Thanks for the extra info there LP. I think the way standby is able to be implemented does differ from system to system, though. My DELL laptop behaves exactly as described in S3 above, however, my custom-built desktop is not able to power down the case fans, as these are connected directly to the power supply, or the fan on the CPU (I disabled fan management in the BIOS).

[delikios]

And a little advice: All the above mean : You can't unplug a computer in standby mode because you will lose all your unsaved data. In a laptop when you use stand by mode and you don't have it plugged in a power source your battery may be exhausted and you may lose unsaved information. From my experience hibernate doesn't always work well in windows xp. From my little experience with Windows vista hibernate works well. Haven't tested hibernate in linux.