Computer’s have become one of the basic necessities of our life. There are few things which are often confusing, like our topic “Turn off, Standby, Hibernate”. To clear off the confusion here is the article:

Turnoff / Shut Down
1.Power to the mother board is cut off, there is no power in the mother board.
2.The computer is completely switched off and at 100 % electricity saving.
3.Booting from Turnoff condition takes long time in comparison to Standby and Hibernate mode.
4.Fresh restart, no work or applications are automatically open. Turning off the computer and restarting from power switch is called “cold booting”, means there is no power in the motherboard after the turning off process.

Standby / Sleep
1.The computer is off, but the RAM is working, there is power in the motherboard (and hard drive depends on system configuration), power to monitor is also off.
2.The computer stores all its open work & applications on RAM, as soon as the computer is switched on, the computer retrieves all data from RAM.
3.In comparison to hibernate and turnoff, this option consumes more power.
4.The restarting time of computer is very less in comparison to turnoff and hibernate.

Hibernate
1.The computer is in off state, it stores all its current data on the hard drive instead of RAM.
2.It opens all the applications as it was stored at the time of hibernating, from hard drive
2.There is no power in the mother board or other components of the computer
3.The power saving is more than standby and less than turn off.
3.The retrieval time after switching on the computer is bit more than standby.

Restart
This is one more option which is available in many systems. The usage of this option is that, it shuts down and restarts the system immediately. In this process power always remains in the motherboard and other components; the RAM refreshes; and since during the process power never goes off, this process is called “warm booting”.

It depends on person to person what they select for their day to day work, but my experience says that one must turn off the computer and restart (cold boot) once in a day. This enables many things to run in a better manner, and system updates are performed during this process.

Author : Debashish Ray, Jalpaiguri, W.B., Bharat

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