You can hibernate, sleep, or shut down your PC, depending on the situation at hand. Ironically, some people do not understand the difference between hibernation and sleep. But shutting down is virtually known by every PC user.
For instance, hibernate is like shutting down your computer, but you can still resume working where you left off. Meanwhile, sleep allows you to continue instantly while using your PC at the cost of some electricity.
There may not be any right way to this; all depends on the situation you find yourself. On the other hand, some like me leave the PC running 24/7.
Each of these options works differently and has its advantages and disadvantages.
Shut Down: A computer that is shut down does not consume power. All the programs, tabs and applications go off immediately you shut down.
However, before you get your PC on again, you’ll have to go through the boot-up process, waiting for your hardware to initialize and startup programs to load.
Sleep: To activate the sleep mode on your PC, means being on standby. Your PC automatically enters a low-power state. What happens when you shut down is that the power is used to keep your PC’s state in memory. When this is happening,the other parts of your PC shut down without any power usage.
You won’t have to wait for your computer to boot up, all the pages and applications will just be the same way, you left it. But, sleeping your computer uses more power than shutting down or hibernating.
Hibernate: When you hibernate, your computer will save it’s current state to your hard drive. By this, I mean it will dump the contents of its RAM into a file on its hard disk.
When you want to boot your PC, it will have to load the previous state from your hard drive into its RAM.
Meanwhile, all your open applications, programs, and data appears on your PC when you come back to later to it. Although, it takes longer to resume from hibernate but uses less power compared to sleep. But the computer uses the same amount of energy is the same thing as shutting down.
Whenever you sleep your PC, its battery goes very low; it will automatically go into hibernate mode to save your state.
When To Shut Down, Sleep, and Hibernate
Like I mentioned earlier, it depends on the situation. The situation determines if you are to shut down, hibernate or sleep.
Personally, I like taking advantage of the convenience of the sleep and hibernate states.
However, here are a few tips for you:
When To Sleep: One of the goals of switching to the sleep mode is because it saves electricity and battery power.
So, sleeping your PC is advisable when you’re stepping away from your computer for a while. When you need to use your computer again, you can resume from where you left off just in less than 1 minute.
When To Hibernate: If you are away for a longer period, let us say 3 hours and above it’s better you hibernate.
Apparently, the disadvantage of hibernating is that there some software or applications that fail to work properly after hibernation.
Also, hibernating slows down the booting process a bit. If you’re hibernating your PC every time, you may be wasting a lot of time waiting for it.
When To Shut Down: It is advisable to shut down because sometimes, your computer gets hang if you hibernate. If you are not working on anything on your PC, just shut down. Meanwhile, it is even better to restart your PC most times. Some Windows users have noticed that Windows needs an occasional reboot.
I hope this was helpful.
