[BigV]

Hey... what do you mean "stay in standby"? I don't understand.

Your computer can be in one of five states: On, off, broken. These are self explanatory. Two other states are ... kind of partway in between on and off, standby and hibernate. In both of these cases, the intention is to have the computer in a power saving state, but ready to return to On and in use quickly. They do this by shutting down non essential components.

For standby, the system is still running, but the display is turned off, the hard drive is parked, the network card is turned off, only the cpu and memory are active. This still draws power, but much less than the regular running state. When you press a key, or open the lid, or whatever wakes it up, POOF, it's up almost instantly, right where you left off.

For hibernate, the complete system state, what's running, the contents of the memory, everything is recorded and written to a special file on your hard drive. Then the system is shut down completely--no power. When the system is restarted, the first thing it does is look for and find the hibernate file, and then it restores everything that is in that file to the running system--just like when you left it.

The big difference between these two is speed and power. Standby is faster, since it doesn't have to write a file, or read a file. But it requires more power since the computer is never off. One risk is that since the computer isn't off and doesn't write any files, if you lose power, you're screwed. Like if the battery drains completely.

Hibernate is slower since it has to write the file on the way down, and then read the file on the way up. But, it consumes NO power, and can last indefinitely. But you pay in time.

So, I don't understand what you mean by "stay in standby". Would you help me understand, please?