So what does Hibernate do?

I can't believe I never thought about it. I have been using computers for over 10 years and only now ask this question.... What is Hibernation mode for? It seems simple to me for shutdown and standby:

Shutdown- While you are away a while, At Night, When packing it away.

Sleep- When you leave temporarily and are coming back soon. (I do use it at night sometimes though for quick start up.)

But really what is hibernate for?

 

Hibernate is basically shuts down the computer with the current state of the computer. Essentially, it turns it off with any and all applications running (though you shouldn't try to shut down while playing games or something ). It'll save that state to your HDD until the next start.

Since you don't have to boot up the computer, it saves you time. No battery life is used during this unlike sleep. Obviously the startup isn't as fast as sleep but it is much faster than a regular boot up

Though, some say it is more beneficial to hibernate more often than shut down so the hard drive isn't affected by wear/tear as much but I am not at all familiar with that argument.

 

Hibernate Saves the contents of the RAM to disk and shuts off the computer. There.

 

Sorry let me restate that. I know what it does. I see no use for it. If I won't be away for long then I'll just put it in Sleep. If I'm away for a long time I'd shut it down to clear memory and processes and all that stuff. Its just my opinion I see very little point in it.

 

yes as said just copies all the things in RAM to HDD,so u can power off.

If u loose power when sleeping,it starts from beginning right?If u hibernate it starts from where you left off.Also the HDD doesn't need power to retain the data unlike RAM.Or in other words a quicker start up and start down

 

What RAMBO29 said.

 

I see what everyone means, but the battery life is not going to die if you are away for a quick time. If you are going to be away for awhile then shutdown to clear out processes and memory (speed things up a bit). Anyway thanks for your views I understand what you mean for the "quick start up".

 

Right there in between.

It basically just puts the information and data in the ram into the harddrive, as previosly stated, and then lets you shutdown and start up somewhat faster than a normal startup.

 

Based upon your computer usage, it could be more useful. You seem to be quite happy with shutting down all the time, but me personally, I like keeping things up as I left them so I don't have to get everything back to where I was if, say, I was in the middle of something when I had to go away from the comp. I usually just leave the comp on, but now that I have a laptop, I'll probably use hibernate more.

 

I use it if I need to swap batteries and don't want to have to close everything, and I think that is the main purpose for it, unless you have a laptop that uses heaps of power in sleep.

 

I pretty much just hibernate nowadays . It`s faster and I don`t have to open all the apps again, cause I have a lot of them opened at a time.