What works better...shutting Vista down all the way or using the Sleep mode?
I have been using sleep mode more often lately and have noticed more responsive programs but is it the right thing to do?
Any advice?
Secondly...I turned off my paging file since I have 4GB of RAM and dont even use 1/2 of it in the my worst case scenario(why would I ever have to allocate that part of my HDD for nothing?)...is it safe to do this?or should I still leave a paging file available?
IDT High Definition Audio/SRS Premium Sound/Altec Lansing
Monitor(s) Displays
17" Laptop Screen
Screen Resolution
1440 x 900 laptop, external 17 in LCD 1024 x 768
Hard Drives
WD Scorpio Blue 320 GB SATA 5400 RPM
Toshiba 68 GB SATA 5400 RPM Second Drive (backup)
PSU
8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
Case
Laptop with "light up" HP Logo on outside
Cooling
Insane air coming out of Targus dual fan cooler
Mouse
Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 / Touchpad
Keyboard
Full Keyboard with numpad
Internet Speed
Comcast Cable 20 MBps
Other Info
Used Primarily for CAD design using SolidWorks 2010.
Also I love to watch HD movies using the HDMI output(Netflix).
Linked to my Xbox 360 for Windows Media Center
3 USB ports + USB/eSata
HP Remote for Windows Media Center and Quickplay
Internal Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
External HP Lightscribe Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
HP Webcam and Microphone
I use the sleep mode almost exclusively and have for a long time. I haven't experienced any negative effects from this use and yes the resume from sleep is a lot faster than starting up from scratch. I do restart bi-weekly just to clean everything up and start freshed.
As to the page file I can't tell you from personal experience which is better but since I run 8gb of Ram I probably don't need it based on my research. I haven't seen any negative results to having this space allocated and not used. I have read that with 4gb you don't need it but as with all tweeks the answer is what makes you comfortable. You could disable it and then if you see a performance hit you could re-enable it, I suspect that unless you are doing memory intensive processing and editing it probably won't have a neg. effect on your system.
It is down to user choice.
If you want to turn off the laptop then you will have to close down, if you are never going to turn off the laptop sleep mode works fine.
I would go throught the cycle of shutting down once a week to clear the memory just in case of a badly written program.
Sleep, hybrid sleep, and hibernation allow you to save your "workstate" and resume it easily. The issue here is that you may come to rely on it - and should the saved workstate become corrupted (which happens at times) - you'll lose the work that you haven't saved.
The pagefile is a whole 'nother deal. You don't need a pagefile unless a program requires it to operation. I ran XP without a pagefile for 6 months and it worked well.
The drawback here is with BSOD's - if you get one and don't have a pagefile, the memory dump won't be saved. Not a big deal unless you want to try and recover the system after a crash. If you can get into Windows you can turn it back on - but if you're not able to get into Windows, then you're stuck with what was on the BSOD (and most people will format and reinstall at this point - so it's not needed for them).
I use sleep all the time instead of shut down. I worked it out for my pc that the power consumed during boot up exceeds that of around 100 minutes of my pc in sleep state.
So what i chose to do was set hibernation for 70 minutes. So if my pc is in sleep mode for 70 minutes it will automatically hibernate.
Also resuming from hibernation is much quicker than a full boot.
How do I set the hybrid sleep to go into hibernate after say 1 hour after I activate sleep mode? and thanks for the input to everyone on the pagefile...through testing its better not to use it...it reduces HDD usage and saves my battery life in the process.
IDT High Definition Audio/SRS Premium Sound/Altec Lansing
Monitor(s) Displays
17" Laptop Screen
Screen Resolution
1440 x 900 laptop, external 17 in LCD 1024 x 768
Hard Drives
WD Scorpio Blue 320 GB SATA 5400 RPM
Toshiba 68 GB SATA 5400 RPM Second Drive (backup)
PSU
8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
Case
Laptop with "light up" HP Logo on outside
Cooling
Insane air coming out of Targus dual fan cooler
Mouse
Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 / Touchpad
Keyboard
Full Keyboard with numpad
Internet Speed
Comcast Cable 20 MBps
Other Info
Used Primarily for CAD design using SolidWorks 2010.
Also I love to watch HD movies using the HDMI output(Netflix).
Linked to my Xbox 360 for Windows Media Center
3 USB ports + USB/eSata
HP Remote for Windows Media Center and Quickplay
Internal Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
External HP Lightscribe Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
HP Webcam and Microphone