[Jacko]

Originally Posted by ryberg

but I can't see the reasoning behind the system not going into the lowest power mode even after several hours of non-use and when it's been closed, to boot.

Anyway, thanks, I'll look for the hibernate settings and see if that changes things.

Steve

More choices are usually better...but perhaps not in your case...

Hibernation vs Standby Mode are very similar and people tend to confuse the differences. Standby basically turns off power consuming components like the hard disks and monitor. It switches the computer to a low power state. Its much like a warm boot. Any contents of memory and unsaved desktop settings are lost. Hibernation saves state information by writing a hibernation file which contains the contents of memory and is thus the same size as total RAM. This is a snapshot of active memory. When you turn your PC back on, the state, including which applications are running (desktop) and the memory contents are restored to RAM and voila! - you are back to where you were when Hibernation mode started. The restoration of state can take place in 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, ....

Hibernation is only available if your system is ACPI-compatible. If it is not, the Hibernation tab will be missing and you will have an APM tab instead. To enable Hibernation mode as one of your Shutdown options:

* click Start / Settings / Control Panel
* double-click Power Options icon
* click Hibernate tab and select the Enable hibernate support check box
if the tab is not there, W2K does not support the feature on your hardware, bios, or whatever. The same dialog box show free disk space and required space to store memory. If it is missing, check for a newer bios for the motherboard.
* click Apply


The actual difference between standby and hibernation is that standby just goes into a low-power mode. The computer remains on, so if the battery dies while in standby, you may lose anything that wasnt saved. In hibernation, the current configuration of the desktop and any programs running and so on is save to the hard disk. Basically, the RAM info is saved to the hard drive so that the computer can fully turn off and the battery is left charged. I've used standby before and it doesnt drain the battery much, but its still more than nothing.