Should You Shut Down, Sleep, or Hibernate Your Laptop?
Computers can sleep, hibernate, or shut down. Sleep allows you to quickly resume
using your laptop at the cost of some electricity. Hibernate is like shutting down
your computer, but you can still resume working where you left off.
There’s no right answer in all situations. Some people leave their computers running
24/7, while others shut down computers the moment they step away. Each of these
options has its advantages and disadvantages.
Shut Down vs. Sleep vs. Hibernate
Each of the three power-down states appears to shut off your computer, but they all
work differently.

Shut Down: This is the power-off state most of us are familiar with. When you
shut down your computer, all your open programs close and the computer shuts
down your operating system. A computer that’s shut down uses almost no
power. However, when you want to use your computer again, you’ll have to turn
it on and go through the typical boot-up process, waiting for your hardware to
initialize and startup programs to load.

Sleep: Also known as Sleep or Standby. In sleep mode, the computer enters a
low-power state. Power is used to keep the computer’s state in memory, but
other parts of the computer are shut down and won’t use any power. When you
turn on the computer, it will snap back to life within just a few seconds. You
won’t have to wait for it to boot up – everything will be right where you left off.
However, this uses more power than shutting down or hibernating your
computer.

Hibernate: Your computer saves its current state to your hard drive, essentially
dumping the contents of its RAM into a file on its hard drive. When you boot up
the computer, it will load the previous state from your hard drive into its RAM.
This allows you to save your computer’s state, including all your open programs
and data, and come back to it later. It takes longer to resume from hibernate
than sleep, but hibernate uses much less power than sleep. A computer that’s
hibernating uses about the same amount of power as a computer that’s shut
down.
If you put your computer to sleep and its battery becomes critically low, the
computer will automatically go into hibernate mode to save your state.
When To Shut Down, Sleep, and Hibernate
Different people treat their computers differently. Some people always shut down
their computers and never take advantage of the convenience of the sleep and
hibernate states, while some people run their computers 24/7.

When To Sleep: Sleep is particularly useful if you’re stepping away from your
computer for a small amount of time. You can put your computer to sleep to
save electricity and battery power. When you need to use your computer again,
you can resume from where you left off in just a few seconds. Your computer
will always be ready to use when you need it.

When To Hibernate: Hibernate saves more power than sleep. If you won’t be
using your computer for a while – say, if you’re going to sleep for the night –
you may want to hibernate your computer to save electricity and battery power.
However, hibernate is slower to resume from. If you’re hibernating or shutting
down your computer every time you step away from it throughout the day, you
may be wasting a lot of time waiting for it.

When To Shut Down: Most computers will resume from hibernate faster than
they will boot up from shut down, so most people will probably want to
hibernate their laptops instead of shutting them down. However, some
computers or software may not work properly when resuming from hibernate, in
which case you’ll want to shut down your computer instead. It’s also a good idea
to shut down (or at least restart) your computer occasionally – most Windows
users have noticed that Windows needs an occasional reboot.
The exact amount of power used by sleep and hibernate will depend on the
computer, although sleep mode generally uses just a few more watts than
hibernate. Some people may opt to use sleep instead of hibernate so their
computers will resume faster – while it does use marginally more electricity, it’s
surely more power efficient than leaving a computer running 24/7.
Hibernate is particularly useful to save battery power on laptops that aren’t plugged
in. if you want to take your laptop somewhere and you don’t want to waste valuable
battery power, you’ll want to hibernate it instead of putting it to sleep.
Making Your Choice
Once you’ve made your choice, you can control what happens when you press the
power button on your computer or close the lid on your laptop. To do so, press the
Windows key, type Power buttons, and press Enter. You’ll see the power button
options in the Windows Control Panel. (On Windows 8, you’ll need to click the
Settings option on the search screen after typing Power buttons.)