Hibernation Vs. Sleep Mode: What’s the difference? And why you should know!

Lisa Hendrickson | May 1, 2012 | 0 Comments

Many of our clients at Call That Girl call in with problems and sometimes they tell us that their computer doesn’t come out of sleep or hibernate very well. I have learned from the old XP days that not all computers are comfy in sleep mode. The computers may be sluggish and don’t want to spring back to life so fast, or they are just aging overall. When Vista came out, I called it the “Vista Coma”, and alerted all of those clients to just not use sleep mode as it usually caused them problems. Windows 7 is not so problematic though, I’m guessing because the computers are selling with higher amounts of hardware memory to allow the sleep and hibernate functions to work as they should.

Let’s do a quick review now of Hibernation vs. Sleep Mode in non-techie terms

Hibernation mode:

Primarily a power saving function
Saves data to the hard drive
Turns off the computer
Uses the least amount of power
Use this mode when you know you are leaving your laptop and might not have a chance to juice up the battery and you don’t want to lose your data.

Sleep mode:

This function is also power saving on your battery
Puts the computer into an “as is” condition so when you come back, everything you were working on should be back to where it was
Should take just a few seconds to resume back to how you left it
Use of this mode is great for those that are fast laptop people, who up and leave the computer often, travel and those who need to close their lids quickly due to security purposes.

In a nutshell, as you read in the quick review here, sleep mode is the best to use for laptops. Hibernate is more like a shut down mode.

For those having problems, here is a quick guide:

XP users with low memory – neither should be used if you are having problems
Vista users with low memory – avoid using the sleep mode if you are having problems
Windows 7 should not have problems, and if you do, you might want to get your computer looked at. Primarily, this is the best operating system for Microsoft so far and has the least issues we have seen with sleep and hibernate modes.