If you know that you will only be away from your PC for a short time and you want to prevent your computer from consuming electricity unnecessarily, you should know that Windows offers various options for saving energy when you are not using your PC.
In fact, you can choose to carry out the Suspension or thehibernation of the PC. These are two PC “rest” modes that may seem similar at first glance, but I assure you that the difference is quite important.
Sleeping or hibernating your PC not only saves energy when you’re not using your PC, it also makes your computer boot faster.
The latter situation was much more important several years ago, when computer performance was quite limited and Windows took much longer to start up than now.
However, these modes are still quite convenient, especially when you don’t feel like saving the work you’re doing and closing documents and apps before turning off the computer.
Suspension and Hibernation: here are the differences
When turn off the computerall open programs, apps and documents are closed, services and system functions are terminated, the RAM memory is emptied, the operating system is closed and finally the power to the PC is cut off.
Later, when you decide to turn on the PC again, it will be necessary to reload the operating system, drivers, services and any programs configured to start automatically.
Everything described in the previous paragraph does not happen with suspend or hibernate. To understand what is the difference between suspension and hibernation, let’s see in detail how the two modes work.
Sleep mode
There sleep mode it is but one energy saving status. When activated, all running programs and open documents are moved to RAM memory, then power is cut off to all components except RAM.
The computer technically remains onbut consumes only the little amount of energy necessary to supply the RAM memory correctly and continuously.
To quickly resume normal operation, just press any key on the keyboard, move the mouse or press the access key.
Sleep mode is perfect to use when you know you won’t be using your PC for a short time. In the latter, the computer will consume very little energy and will always be ready to start normally very quickly.
Hibernation mode
There hibernate mode is similar to suspend, but instead of saving running programs and open documents in RAM memory, it saves them to the hard disk or SSD and later the computer is shut down completelyso the energy consumption is zero.
However, the system restart will be slower since it will have to load all the data saved on the disk and the latter has a much lower speed than the memory RAM. But if you use a good SSD or M.2 disk, the reboot won’t be that slow.
Hibernation is very useful if you think you won’t be using your PC for some timemoreover it is essential in notebooks, since in the event that the battery should be completely discharged, the open documents will not be lost, because they were previously saved on the disk.
How to enable hibernation mode
By opening the Start Menu and clicking on the icon “Stop” a context menu with only three items will be shown: “Suspend”, “Shut down” And “Reboot the system”.
As you can see, there is no entry that allows you to activate hibernation mode, this happens because in the latest versions of the operating system from Microsoft, hibernation mode is disabled by default.
Fortunately it is possible quickly enable hibernation modethanks to a command to be typed on the Command Prompt.
Here’s how to enable it:
- Type in the Windows search form “cmd”;
- Click on the entry “Run as administrator”;
- Click “Yes”;
- In the Prompt window, type the following command:
powercfg /hibernate on- Awards ENTER.
Now, you will need to enable the voice “Hibernation” on the Start Menu, then do the following:
- Open the Control Panel, to do this press from the keyboard WIN+Rtype “control panel” and click on the button “OK” or press ENTER. Alternatively type in the Windows search field “Control Panel”then click the first result or press ENTER;
- Make sure next to the item “View by” present at the top right and select the item “Category”;
- Click on the entry “System and Security”;
- Click on the entry “Power Options”;
- From the left side menu, click on the item “Specify power button behavior”;
- Click on the entry “Change settings that are currently unavailable”;
- Select the item “Hibernation” present in the section “Shutdown Settings”;
- Click on the button “Save Changes”.
