Sleep vs. hibernate power settings

[Doug Gordon]

I know the difference between these two shutdown states, but on my new Vista
notebook PC the power management settings show different timeouts for going
into these states, such as sleep after 1 hour and hibernate after 6 hours.

The notebook does go into sleep mode as expected, but do these settings mean
that, after going into the sleep state, the notebook will then drop into the
hibernation state after the longer time period? Can it go from sleep to
hibernate on its own like that?

 

[John]

I know the difference between these two shutdown states, but on my new
Vista notebook PC the power management settings show different timeouts for
going into these states, such as sleep after 1 hour and hibernate after 6
hours.

The notebook does go into sleep mode as expected, but do these settings
mean that, after going into the sleep state, the notebook will then drop
into the hibernation state after the longer time period? Can it go from
sleep to hibernate on its own like that?

Yes. They can use the BIOS timer to wake up the machine.