Hibernate or Suspend

[Nuclear Krusader]

What is the difference between the two?

Which one should I use?

TIA

[Statica]

There are various modes on what is conventionally known as "suspend" and hibernate. From the common versions of ACPI that are in common use-
Hibernate is a kind of deep sleep, also known as S4, it basically powers down all your devices and stores the contents of the RAM to your hard drive. This isnt what you would actually call a suspend mode because the computer is indeed off. However, the difference between being truly powered off (state S5) and hibernate is that the computer doesnt need to go to through a boot cycle. It simply replaces the contents of your saved hibernated file back on to RAM and away you go. Mind you, in hibernate the computer does not monitor for activity to bring it out of its hibernation, so you have to press the power button.

Suspend, these days anyway, is commonly state S3, where all the devices are powered down, the only power consumption by your system is for keeping the state of your RAM active. Hence the term STR or suspend to RAM.
Typically, older generations of suspend also did things like Turn of Hard drives, CPU, optical drives and monitor (S2) or hard drives and optical drives S1.

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As to which you should use, well the direct answer is determined by the type of your hard drive.
If you have a newish laptop, then you will want to consider what you are performing the particular operation for.
If you are purely on battery, then know that "Suspend" will consume your battery life. If you are moving your laptop for a short distance, hibernate is better to prevent that freak occurence of your battery being loose inside its compartment or sthing unforseen like that.

If you are on a desktop with a newish BIOS then I guess the answer really depends on how fast you want to boot up to utilize your machine. Again, any freak power loss will cause your system to go through an unsceduled off if you are STR. However if you are using hibernate you cannot use some devices to bring you back.
Another point you should consider before replacing shut down with hibernate is that hibernate does take up your hard drive space, usually on your system drive (2k/XP etc calls it hiberfil.sys) and given the size of your RAM and its usage, you might be putting a real large file on your system drive. And being that Windows systems are stricken with issues of performance degradation by fragmentation.
Shut down does, give your system the opportunity to get rid of anything that did not terminate properly, and have a fresh start, so dont rule out a complete shut down.

HTH

[Nuclear Krusader]

Thanks, Statica. That cleared things out for me. I was wondering 'cause the Hibernate function is "hidden" in XP. I am running a desktop system, btw.

I always turn off my puter if it won't be used for more than 3 hours, else I always use the Suspend feature. I don't like to use it for longer times 'cause I have discovered I have to reset the DSL modem when I leave it in suspend more than 6 hours.