And then there??™s
the small matter of the Hibernate feature being completely absent from
Windows Vista.
There??™s a drawback to using any of these sleep states exclusively.
Namely, Windows gets cranky when it has had too
much sleep: performance worsens, some features stop working
properly, and applications are more prone to crashes.
The remedy is to shut down and restart Windows periodically,
at least once or twice a week (more for heavy use),
which, of course, somewhat negates the overall time saved
by employing sleep features in the first place. Alternatively,
you may choose to avoid sleeping your PC altogether; you??™ll
enjoy a more stable environment, but you??™ll lose the convenience
of the ???instant on??? feature.
216 | Chapter 5: Performance
The solicitude of Sleep
Instead, Vista provides only a hybrid of Standby and Hibernate (discussed
next) which Microsoft calls Sleep mode. Basically, Sleep puts your PC in the
S3 power-saving mode just like Standby, but only after saving the stuff in
your PC??™s memory to disk??”somewhat like Hibernate??”so you won??™t lose
data if you cut power to your PC.
So, Sleep is the best of both worlds, right?
Not so fast. First of all, Sleep doesn??™t work that well with some modern PCs;
cut power to your computer, and Windows may lose the saved state from
the last session after all, making it no better than Standby. Second, Sleep
doesn??™t completely shut down your computer, which means that it??™s still
using more electricity than it would if it were truly powered off.
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