John R. Sellers said:
Is one better than the other?
Shutdown trys in an orderly way to shutdown your apps and the OS, and then
removes power from the system. This insures the next time you start the
system it starts from a cold boot and all hardware gets a power on reset.
Restart is almost the same as a Shutdown followed imediatly by a power on,
but it doesn't remove power from everything. It's refered to as a warm
boot. It attempts to reset all hardware, but there could be a slight
difference in the the state of the some hardware where power was not really
removed. In general it should not make any difference compared to a cold
boot. I consider a piece of hardware that requires a cold boot rather than
a warm boot defective, but, that's just me.
Standby halts user program execution (but does not terminate them), puts the
OS and the system in a low power state, may shut off the disks and other
hardware (in an orderly fashion) and may reduce the speed of your processor.
The system maintains it's state and can be awakened very rapidly.
Marc Reinig
System Solutions
