Previously we have discussed some of the financial and environmental benefits available with the new Vista power saving features.

Today we will discuss more about the power management features and how they work. By default the Windows Vista power managment features should be enabled, but it is worth knowing more about them, so you can implement your own power saving strategy.

The Windows Vista power features were created to reduce power consumption, but they also had the goal of making it very easy, fast and reliable to turn the computer “on” or “off”.

Previous versions of Windows had standby, hibernate and shut down. Vista has Sleep, Hybrid Sleep and Hibernation.  You can access the power management features in the following location:

Control Panel -> Systems and Maintenance -> Power Options

Power modes in Windows Vista:

Sleep: The computer enters a low power consumption mode, with programs and data in memory. Restarting from the sleep mode is very fast and should only take a couple of seconds.

Hybrid Sleep: The computer enters a low power consumption mode, with programs and data in memory but the computer also writes data to disk. So if there was a power outage, the computer can be recovered to the same state.  Restarting from hybrid sleep mode will be slower than in regular sleep mode.

Hibernate: Computer data is saved to a special file. If the computer is switched off or unplugged, all data is stored and state can be recovered.

Additionally, you can also set what happens when the power button is pressed, or when the lid is closed (for laptops). For example: you could set the computer into hibernate mode when the power button is pressed, instead of shutting down. The same also applies to closing the lid.

As mentioned earlier, the default settings in Vista are setup to conserve power, however, you can optimize these, based on whether you want to use sleep mode, hybrid sleep or hibernation.