Standby vs. Hibernation mode in my laptop?
Hibernation vs Standby Mode are very similar and easy to confuse the two. Standby turns off power consuming components like the hard disks and display. It switches the computer to a low power state. Standby maintains power to your computer's memory so you don't lose your work.
Hibernation saves state information by writing a hibernation file which contains the contents of memory and is thus the same size as total RAM. This is a snapshot of active memory. When you turn your PC back on, the state, including which applications are running (desktop) and the memory contents are restored to RAM and voila! - you are back to where you were when Hibernation mode started. The restoration of state can take place in 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, ….