Computers need power — and plenty of it. But if you’re like many, you have reasons to be concerned about how much power your computer actually uses. You might want to lower your electricity bill or simply reduce the impact that your computing has on the environment. Or, if you frequently find yourself on the road, you no doubt want to reduce the amount of power that your notebook uses so that you can get longer life out of a single battery charge.
When it comes to energy use, the good news is that you have plenty of options available to reduce the power consumption of your PC. The bad news is that it’s sometimes difficult to know which power saving options to use in which situation. Read on to find out.
Q: What’s the difference between sleep mode and hibernate mode on Windows?
A: These are two power-saving options. Both are designed to allow you to resume work on your PC faster than if you shut your computer down entirely.
You can remember the difference between sleep and hibernate by remembering the difference between the words “sleep” and “hibernate” before computers came along. Essentially, when you sleep, you can wake up again pretty quickly. If you were to hibernate, you’d be unavailable for a bit longer.
The same goes for your Windows computer. Sleep mode shuts down some components of your PC, but everything that is active in memory (RAM) remains alive, so that when you “wake” your computer up by pressing a key or the power button, the machine returns to the state in which you left it almost immediately — with applications, browser windows, and documents in exactly the same state.
As you might imagine, a computer in sleep mode continues to use some power, since the contents of RAM must be maintained….