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From: Metspitzer on 13 May 2010 18:57
I have a Dell laptop that came with Vista with a free Win7 upgrade.

I mainly use my laptop when I go to the doctor. I have to have labs
done, and then wait an hour and a half for results before I see the
doctor. I also have to move from one area of the hospital to another
twice.

It is nice that during the moving time I can close the laptop and then
have it right back up when I move. Because my battery dies when I
leave the laptop for a few days, I changed some of the settings. I
still don't have the right ones.

I would like to have my laptop "wake up" quickly if I open it again
within say 20 min (sleep?). I would also like to have it save my
settings for an hour (hibernate?) to give me another chance to open it
during the day. Then, I would like to have it shut down completely if
I don't use it for say 3 hours. (shutdown)

The guy at Dell says that I can't do this. He says that I have to
manually set the computer to shutdown to keep the battery from dying.

I am guessing that many people use their laptops this way and I just
have a setting wrong. Do you have to manually shut down?

From: Barry Watzman on 14 May 2010 00:23
Sleep puts the laptop in an extreme low power mode without actually
turning off. It will still die, but it takes much longer. The amount
of time varies from model to model.

Hibernate saves everything to disk and then shuts down. Resuming is not
instant but is faster than booting up, and you open "as you were" (with
all of your open applications and files exactly as you left them).

Not all laptops support Hibernate, and even if it is supported, it has
to be enabled in the power setup. Hibernation requires creating a
hibernate file which is quite large (as large as the amount of memory
you have and a bit more, so it can be gigabytes).


Metspitzer wrote:
> I have a Dell laptop that came with Vista with a free Win7 upgrade.
>
> I mainly use my laptop when I go to the doctor. I have to have labs
> done, and then wait an hour and a half for results before I see the
> doctor. I also have to move from one area of the hospital to another
> twice.
>
> It is nice that during the moving time I can close the laptop and then
> have it right back up when I move. Because my battery dies when I
> leave the laptop for a few days, I changed some of the settings. I
> still don't have the right ones.
>
> I would like to have my laptop "wake up" quickly if I open it again
> within say 20 min (sleep?). I would also like to have it save my
> settings for an hour (hibernate?) to give me another chance to open it
> during the day. Then, I would like to have it shut down completely if
> I don't use it for say 3 hours. (shutdown)
>
> The guy at Dell says that I can't do this. He says that I have to
> manually set the computer to shutdown to keep the battery from dying.
>
> I am guessing that many people use their laptops this way and I just
> have a setting wrong. Do you have to manually shut down?
>
From: BillW50 on 14 May 2010 18:24
In news:hsij8g$prt$1(a)news.eternal-september.org,
Barry Watzman typed on Fri, 14 May 2010 00:23:42 -0400:
> Sleep puts the laptop in an extreme low power mode without actually
> turning off. It will still die, but it takes much longer. The amount
> of time varies from model to model.
>
> Hibernate saves everything to disk and then shuts down. Resuming is
> not instant but is faster than booting up, and you open "as you were"
> (with all of your open applications and files exactly as you left
> them).
> Not all laptops support Hibernate, and even if it is supported, it has
> to be enabled in the power setup. Hibernation requires creating a
> hibernate file which is quite large (as large as the amount of memory
> you have and a bit more, so it can be gigabytes).
>
>
> Metspitzer wrote:
>> I have a Dell laptop that came with Vista with a free Win7 upgrade.
>>
>> I mainly use my laptop when I go to the doctor. I have to have labs
>> done, and then wait an hour and a half for results before I see the
>> doctor. I also have to move from one area of the hospital to another
>> twice.
>>
>> It is nice that during the moving time I can close the laptop and
>> then have it right back up when I move. Because my battery dies
>> when I leave the laptop for a few days, I changed some of the
>> settings. I still don't have the right ones.
>>
>> I would like to have my laptop "wake up" quickly if I open it again
>> within say 20 min (sleep?). I would also like to have it save my
>> settings for an hour (hibernate?) to give me another chance to open
>> it during the day. Then, I would like to have it shut down
>> completely if I don't use it for say 3 hours. (shutdown)
>>
>> The guy at Dell says that I can't do this. He says that I have to
>> manually set the computer to shutdown to keep the battery from dying.
>>
>> I am guessing that many people use their laptops this way and I just
>> have a setting wrong. Do you have to manually shut down?

I have four Gateway laptops (they all use the same battery) and four
Asus netbooks (they all use the same battery too). And I bought a spare
battery for each. So I have five of each (five for the Gateway laptops
and five for the Asus netbooks).

And I too spend a lot of time in hospitals (not for me but for others
who I take). And I rarely take a laptop, so I don't know how long they
will run in standby off hand. Although at home I use hibernation mode
for the laptops and they use almost nothing in hibernation (there is a
problem with most Celerons that still uses a little bit of power in
hibernation and will deplete a battery in a week or two [in hibernation
or off]).

But I can tell you that my netbooks could go for days without problems
in standby mode on the battery alone. The longest I have tried was 48
hours and they were only down to 70%. I don't know about my Gateways,
but I do know that standby hits them a lot harder than my Asus netbooks.
If I remember right, I believe they only last about 6 hours or so in
standby. I really should test those Gateways I guess. As 6 hours seems a
bit short.

But whether I take a laptop or a netbook, I also take a spare battery
too. I very seldom need it, but it is nice to have it during those rare
times when the one I have in there runs low.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Windows XP SP3


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