How long can PC stay in Standby Mode in XP

[shadowman]

Hello,
        i searched through many sites regarding Standby and Hibernate functions in XP: Both the functions are for saving power, but the difference being the STANDBY can remain in that state for a shorter time, i mean real short time, if i leave my PC for 5 Mins and turn the power on, it simply wont boot to desktop, unlike HIBERNATE it writes all the data that is open , even if i leave the PC for 1 hr the HIBERNATE functions seems to work well. It would restore to desktop, but Standby boots to desktop really quickly.
  Both the functions having its plus and minuses : but is their any way i would make Standby mode to work after i leave my PC for 3 or 4 hours. I have enabled the Power Management from the BIOS, and checked all the settings from the POWER option in ie., Right Click properties/ScreenSaver/Power/ etc etc.....

Any suggestions would be great.

[f0dder]

Unfortunately, standby mode has never been 100% stable for me, regardless of hardware or operating systems - and this is a lot of different motherboards and CPUs (both AMD and Intel), and a wide range of operating systems (Win9x through 98SE, Win2000, XP, Vista, Win7). It works most of the time on Win7, but once a blue moon I'll get a BSOD in the nvidia drivers (my workstation), and my laptop simply won't start (entering a state where the power button turns off immediately, rather than the keep-pressed-x-seconds... I believe this is a chipset or BIOS rather than OS issue).

It's a real shame, because standby mode uses about the same power as power-off state... and boots a lot faster than hibernate.

[Ath]

Unfortunately, standby mode has never been 100% stable for me, regardless of hardware or operating systems ...

Standby and Hibernate modes have been stable on my Toshiba and ASUS laptops (both Intel T6400 CPU's) running Windows 7 x64, and an MSI mainboard with Intel E8500 CPU and NVidia graphics running Vista x86. Earlier hardware (desktop systems) and OS versions nearly ever would work (a variety of Intel and AMD CPU's on several types and brands of mainboards, running from Windows 95 to XP).
So it's indeed both a hardware/BIOS and OS related issue. It's mandatory you have the latest WHQL-certified video drivers installed, next to all Windows updates, naturally.

[f0dder]

Hibernate should always be stable, as it does a RAM dump to disk and a full power-down - the only time I can imagine it failing is if you have some really shoddily programmed drivers

It's weird that there's so much trouble getting standby working properly... it's doyc-damn old technology by now.

[shadowman]

Thank you all for ur input, although i am quite happy with Hibernate, it would work when i am playing a game or in a middle of something and even if the power is switced off: it would take the same time to restore to Desktop.
But if Standby was more like Hibernate, i would have used it period.
Although Hibernate is more stable in Win7 and thats that,,,but Hibernate is more stable and reliable.

[Deozaan]

It takes longer to start up from Hibernate on my netbook than doing a fresh boot. :-/

[Ath]

It takes longer to start up from Hibernate on my netbook than doing a fresh boot. :-/

Still glad I didn't get one of those It's totally not worth the annoyance.

[Deozaan]

It takes longer to start up from Hibernate on my netbook than doing a fresh boot. :-/

Still glad I didn't get one of those It's totally not worth the annoyance.

Well, to be fair, I put Windows 7 on it and it wasn't really designed to handle that.

[f0dder]

It takes longer to start up from Hibernate on my netbook than doing a fresh boot. :-/

Ugh. HOW slow is the harddrive?

[Deozaan]

It takes longer to start up from Hibernate on my netbook than doing a fresh boot. :-/

Ugh. HOW slow is the harddrive?

Your standard 2.5" 5400 RPM HDD. It was either that or a 16GB SSD, which could barely fit Windows XP and Microsoft Office at the same time.

[Carol Haynes]

The other issue I have had with hibernate is that it sometimes doesn't renew local IP addresses when starting up and you end up with a network conflict. Not a big issue but irritating.