Shutdown, Hibernate or Put To Sleep – Which Option Is Best For Your Laptop?

You probably may have been faced with this decision more than once; Hibernate, put to sleep or simply shutdown your PC. What option did you take? What option should you take?

Simply put, the choice is yours on the options to take. Your work schedule or purpose for use of these laptops should largely determine what option you should take.

Hibernating or putting your PC to sleep usually preserves your PC state, keeping your workfiles and applications intact for you to continue with whenever you choose to do so. Perhaps the major difference between these two options is that with Sleep, is a power-saving state that allows a computer to quickly resume full-power operation (typically within several seconds) when you want to start working again. Putting your computer into the sleep state is like pausing a DVD player—the computer immediately stops what it’s doing and is ready to start again when you want to resume working. (I quoted Microsoft there). Hibernate, on the other hand, puts your open documents and programs on your hard disk, and then turns off your computer. Of all the power-saving states in Windows, hibernation uses the least amount of power. .

Sleep is good for short periods while hibernate is advisable if your laptop will be away from a power source for a long time. Note that if you will be transporting your laptop in a backpack, hibernate is advisable because of the heat that would be generated from your laptop if put to sleep.

PC Hibernate Or PC Sleep ModePutting your computer to sleep is popular with pre-Windows 8 systems largely because of the long boot up time of the Operating Systems. Putting your PC to sleep shaves a lot of precious seconds, even minutes, off the boot up time. Things have, however, changed a bit with Windows 8 which has a fairly fast bootup time.

A class of people however prefer to leave their laptops on 24/7. While this has an advantage of giving you quick access to your PC whenever you need it, it can however be a security risk if it is left online – well, except it is being used as a server. Also, because of the heat generated by the laptop, its internal components and USB accessories also stand a risk of being fried.

Geek Recommendation

– Put your laptop to sleep only for very short periods; lunch breaks maybe.
– Hibernate for longer periods, especially if you have unfinished tasks or open windows you are working on.
– Nothing beats the good old shutting down of your laptop. Windows OS sure needs to reboot itself very often to keep it functional.

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