Updated: July 9, 2020 (January 3, 2000)

Power Management States

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

Manufacturers implement a variety of power-saving states in laptops and call them by a variety of names. Some frequently implemented states are outlined in the chart below.

State	Also Known As	Description	Power Use	Time to Wake	Standard Designations
Working	Awake, Full On	Normal operating state	Highest	0	APM Enabled/Full On, ACPI G0
Standby		Processor slowed or stopped, programs and data kept in memory, some devices off	High	Near 0	APM Standby, ACPI S1 or S2
Sleeping	Suspend	Processor stopped, programs and data kept in memory, many devices off	Medium	Short	APM Suspend, ACPI S3
Hibernating	Suspend-to-disk, Nonvolatile sleep	Processor stopped, programs and data saved to disk, most devices off, but some events (e.g., arrival of a network packet) can awaken the system	Low	Medium	APM Suspend (with hibernation), ACPI S4
Soft

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