"Stand By" vs. "Hibernate" vs"Power down"

[kenberman]

When I leave for work for the day, which of these should I do to my home desktop?

stand by or hibernate? I'd rather not reboot completely every night when I come home, but will if that is best for PC maintenance. if I'm gone for a few days, I will shut down completely

[TheTROLL]

Depends why you don't want to power it off completely, really. If it's to preserve your desktop state (ie, come back to all applications as you left them), then Hibernate - this writes the memory to disk so isn't using power while you're away. Only use Standby if you need to be able to get back to where you were really quickly.

[kenberman]

[ QUOTE ]
Depends why you don't want to power it off completely, really.

[/ QUOTE ]

only reason is that I figured it wasn't good to leave the PC powered on 24/7.

I thought that hibernate or standby would be better from a PC health standpoint.

sounds like hibernate is the way to go for me - too bad there isn't a link off the start button/shut down screen for that.


fyi, this is a new Dimension 9100.

[Nomad84]

I can't remember for sure, but I think you hold shift (or some similar key) and one of the options, probably "Turn Off", changes to Hibernate.

[Sean D]

Yeah, just push "Turn off computer" on the start menu, and hold the shift key, and the hibernate option should become available.

[grinin]

thats interesting I have left my desktop on 24/7 for over a year and the previous one was for 4-5 years. Only turned it off if I was going to be gone for the weekend or started to experience sluggishness.

Should I be turning this thing off more often or standby or whatever?