With their compact design, laptops are undoubtedly convenient and easy to use. The downside, however, is that many of them have a short battery life. If your laptop isn’t plugged into a wall outlet, it may run out of battery power relatively quickly. You can extend the battery life of your laptop, however, by using the sleep or hibernation power setting. So, what’s the difference between these two settings?
What Is the Sleep Power Setting?
Sleep is a power setting that’s designed to minimize power consumption by disabling all or most processes on your laptop. When configured, most laptops will enter sleep mode after a specified period of inactivity. If leave your laptop idle for 10 or 15 minutes, for instance, it may enter sleep mode. During this process, your laptop will save all of your active-running files and applications to its random access memory (RAM).
The sleep power setting helps to converse battery life by reducing the amount of power your laptop consumes. When your laptop enters sleep mode, it will consume very little power. And when you’re ready to use it again, you pick up right where you left off since all your applications and files will be stored to your laptop’s RAM.
What Is the Hibernation Power Setting?
Hibernation is a power setting that, like sleep, is designed to minimize power consumption. The main difference between sleep and hibernation is that the former saves all your active-running files and applications to your laptop’s RAM, whereas the latter saves them all to your laptop’s storage drive.
When compared to the sleep power setting, hibernation consumes even less power. It stored all active-running files and applications to your laptop’s storage drive, such as a hard-disk drive (HHD), allowing for a superior level of energy efficiency. The downside to using hibernation is that it takes a little longer to resume your tasks. Once your laptop enters hibernation mode, you’ll experience a delay when trying to resume it. It’s not a particularly long delay, but it’s still longer than that of the sleep mode.
Hybrid Mode
A third power setting that’s available in many Windows computers is hybrid mode. Basically, hybrid mode is a combination of sleep and hibernation. It works by storing some of your active-running files and applications on the RAM and some of them on the storage drive. Hybrid mode also uses energy-efficient technology that conserves power usage while also allowing you to quickly resume your activities.
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