What’s the Difference Between Sleep and Hibernate in Windows?

Sleep mode is a power saving state that is similar to pausing a DVD movie. All actions on the computer are stopped, any open documents and applications are put in memory while the computer goes into a low-power state. The computer technically stays on, but only uses a bit of power. You can quickly resume normal, full-power operation within a few seconds. Sleep mode is basically the same thing as “Standby” mode.

Sleep mode is useful if you want to stop working for a short period of time. The computer doesn’t use much power in Sleep mode, but it does use some.

Hibernate mode is very similar to sleep, but instead of saving your open documents and running applications to your RAM, it saves them to your hard disk. This allows your computer to turn off entirely, which means once your computer is in Hibernate mode, it uses zero power. Once the computer is powered back on, it will resume everything where you left off. It just takes a bit longer to resume than sleep mode does (though with an SSD, the difference isn’t as noticeable as it is with traditional hard drives).

Use this mode if you won’t be using your laptop for an extended period of time, and you don’t want to close your documents.