Windows 7 Articles » Sleep Feature Improved in Windows 7

Sleep Feature Improved in Windows 7

Submitted by Kenneth Pennington on Tuesday, 6 January 20093 Comments

Anyone who’s tried using the sleep or hibernate feature in Windows Vista on a regular basis knows that Vista’s wake-up feature is terribly flawed.

But, Windows 7 brings good news to PC users wishing to put their computers to sleep and resume normally. The Windows 7 Sleep feature lets the computer only power its memory and uses “typically less than 1W on a mobile PC and typically less than 3W on a desktop PC.” According to the Microsoft-made graph below, Sleep is a better choice than Shutting Down.

Sleep consumes nearly the same amount of power as Shut Down, but resumes the system in less than 2 seconds, instead of going through the boot process.

I performed my own experiment to test out Microsoft’s 2-second resume promise. Turns out, they weren’t lying! Sleep and Resume performed extremely well. Watch my poorly-recorded video below:

http://www.vimeo.com/2745955

In addition to speed improvements, Microsoft has also fixed the reliability problems seen in Vista. After using Seven for about a month straight, I have not had one problem. I have closed the lid on my laptop countless times, over and over, and it always resumes cleanly with everything running properly.

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3 Comments »

Kirk said:

It doesn’t do that on mine! Sleep or no sleep every time I come back to my PC I have to manually power off and on again.

- 27 July 2009 at 4:07 am

jim said:

microsoft says they improved the sleep in win7 but in fact they ruined it for me because in vista i was able to sleep and resume but in win7 it laggs so bad after it resumes that i have to manually turn off my laptop to get it to work

- 19 December 2009 at 2:21 pm

Frank M. Whitman said: