Question about Sleep mode

[faolan]

What happens when your computer is in sleep mode and there is a power outage? Does the computer reboot when the power is restored, or remain off? Is there greater chance of damage to a computer in sleep mode when there is a surge or brown-out, even if it's plugged into a surge protector? Is it better just to shut it down completely, unless using a UPS?

 

[Barman58]

Hi faolan, and welcome to the vista forums

As far as protection of data is concerned regular sleep mode is exactly the same as the PC being on normally, you will lose any unsaved changes to open files, the purpose of sleep mode is power saving, this is done by switching off all components except for the processor and memory. If power should be lost when in sleep mode the computer will reboot on resuming power unless it has been set in the BIOS not to do so.

A more secure "Sleep" is hibernation where all the contents in memory are saved to disk and the PC shut down to a very low level this state will survive a poser loss without loss of data but requires a block of disk space the size of the memory in use and is also slower to resume.

Windows Vista also includes a Hybrid mode which goes into sleep mode and then after a set delay goes into Hibernation.

Hope this clarifies things