Tip: The difference between shutdown, sleep, and hibernation in Windows Vista/7

Open the Start menu, then click the triangle arrow button in the lower right corner, and you will see many options (as shown below). Most of these options are straightforward and can be used at a glance, but some options can be confusing for many people, such as “standby,” “hibernate,” and “sleep.” What is the difference between these features? What is the difference between "shutter" and "shutdown"? This is what this article is about.

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Figure 1, different shutdown options in Windows

Before continuing to read, please make an analogy and compare our computer Study the room and see what is the same in the operational process.

Assuming there is a bookcase in the study, a desk, and us. There are a lot of books in the bookcase, we all want to see. When reading a book, you must take the book out of the bookcase and spread it out to the desk. For those with a wide range of hobbies, we may need to read a lot of books at the same time, so we will take them all out and put them on the desk.

This time the desk is full, but we found that we need to take a few books out of the bookcase. But there is no space on the desk, so we decided to put the books that we didn't look at first and put them back in the bookcase. Then take out the new book from the bookcase and put it on the desk. After half an hour, we may need to put some books that we don't read back into the bookcase, and take other books from the bookcase and put them on the desk.

In fact, this process is very similar to the data processing method in the computer. Bookcases can be thought of as computer hard drives, desks can be thought of as computer memory, and reading us is the computer's processor.

After starting the computer, if you need to run a new program, Windows will first read the program files from the hard disk into the memory and wait for the processor to process. Of course, there may be many programs running on the computer at the same time, many of which are quietly running in the background, so we are not aware of it. But like a desk, the memory capacity of a computer is limited. If too many programs are opened at the same time, the memory can't be loaded, but you need to continue to open more programs. How should Windows handle this?

Windows will "scratch" a program that has not been used for a while to the bookcase (hard disk), and then read the file of the new program to be run from the hard disk and save it to the memory (desk).

After a period of use, there are a lot of programs running on the computer. Some of these programs are kept in memory, and some are "temporary" on the hard disk. If we don't plan to use a computer at this time, the differences between "shutdown", "sleep", and "sleep" can be reflected.

If you "shut down", then Windows will save the state of all running programs (for example, half of the documents written in Word), and close all programs (can be imagined to close the book directly) And save it to the hard drive, then completely cut off the power of the computer.

If you "hibernate", Windows will also save all running programs to the hard disk. But the difference with the shutdown is that when shutting down, Windows will "close" the book and put it back in the bookcase; but when sleeping, Windows does not close the book, put it back directly into the bookcase, and empty everything on the desk. Then completely cut off the power of the computer.

If you sleep, this time Windows will put the book back in the bookcase, but the book remains open, and this step is exactly the same as sleeping. However, during sleep, the contents of the desk will not be emptied. Windows will cut off the power supply of all devices except memory, but the power supply to the memory will continue, so the data in the memory will not be lost.
This means that if you want to shut down the computer, Windows must first close all running programs, then turn off the system background service, and then send a special signal to the motherboard and power supply, so that the power supply cuts off power to all devices. The computer is completely turned off. After the next boot, the computer completes the self-test, then loads the Windows system into memory, then continues to load other background services and displays the login interface. After logging in, you can run your own program and start using your computer. The entire process takes the most time because it has to be completely shut down and the system and programs started up again.