Windows 2000 Power Management

Windows 98 was supposed to bring about superior power management via the Standby and Hibernate features. When the computer goes into Standby it enters into a lower-power consumption state by turning off hard drives and the monitor. A simple movement of the mouse or a tap on the keyboard should bring the computer back into full-power and operational mode. As many people discovered, however, this was far from the case in Windows 98 (and Second Edition). Often times people found their computers not being able to wake up from Standby, especially if the machine had entered Standby a second time. As for the Hibernate mode, even fewer people were able to get it to work. Only computers equipped with ACPI BIOS with hard drives formatted using FAT16 would have some sort of chance of getting Hibernate to work properly. From testing the Release-to-Manufacturing version of Windows 2000 Professional, however, it is apparent that Microsoft has made great strides in the areas of power management.

So what exactly is Hibernate, anyway? In essence it is a technology that allows your computer to boot very quickly into Windows in exactly the same state as you left it before you turned off computer. When you put your computer into Hibernation, Windows 2000 writes an image of your computer's memory into a file on the hard disk, and then the computer is automatically shutdown if your computer is ACPI-compliant and you have an ATX motherboard and case. If you have the older AT style systems, you will have to manually turn off the machine- Windows 2000 will display a message telling you that it is safe to turn off the computer. When computer is turned back on, Windows 2000 will read the Hibernate image into memory. The result is a super-fast boot up, and into the same state of Windows before you put the PC into Hibernation. So for instance, if you were working on a document in Word and a spreadsheet in Excel, after Hibernation those same applications and documents will be right there in the same positions after booting. Very cool. One slight drawback is that extra disk space will be used up, but with today's massive hard drives, that should not be much of an issue. Another drawback is that shutdown will be slower than normal shutdown. As the benchmarks show below, however, a fast computer will hibernate just as quickly as normal shutdown. To get the fastest possible boot and shutdown performance using Hibernate, a full defragmentation of should be performed on the C: drive before enabling Hibernate support. This way it can be ensured that the Hibernate image file will be written into a contiguous physical space on the hard drive.

For the boot from Hibernation tests, although the K6/233 system had the least amount of RAM, it booted up the slowest. This can be attributed to the slower processor, RAM (it uses EDO), and disk subsystem. The K6-2 300 outperformed the Celeron 466, but this is due to the fact that it only has 96 MB of RAM while the Celeron machine has 224- the more RAM a system has, the larger the image file, and thus more data needs to be loaded into memory to start Windows. The shutdown to Hibernate test results suggest that the faster the computer, the smaller the performance gap between normal shutdown and shutdown to hibernate. Although the Celeron system had 224 MB of RAM, it was surprising to see that shutdown to hibernate time was identical to the time it took to shutdown normally. In short, with Hibernation enabled, the Celeron, K6-2, and K6 systems booted 150%, 288%, and 86% faster, respectively. The Celeron experienced no delay in shutting down with Hibernation, though the K6-2 and K6 were 10% and 170% slower, respectively.

The benchmarks are very persuasive. After seeing the numbers, there should be no reason not to enable Hibernate :-). To enable Hibernate in Windows 2000, go to the Control Panel, double-click on Power Options, select the Hibernate tab, and then check the Enable hibernate support (see image). That is all there is to it- the computer does not even need to be rebooted afterwards.

If you have an ACPI/ATX system, then you can also set up your computer so that when you press the power button, the computer goes into Hibernation or Standby or Power Off- whichever you prefer (see image).

In addition, you can manually place the computer into Standby or Hibernation or have it automatically enter either state after a specified time (see image). Note that this particular screen shot is taken from a non-ACPI, non-ATX system, and therefore the Standby option is missing, although there is a tab to enable APM (Advanced Power Management, the older method of conserving power), however. For security reasons, you can can also password-protect your computer for Standby or Hibernation (see image).

In Windows 2000, Microsoft has done a fantastic job in improving the power management features since Windows 98. The highly-touted Hibernate feature works great, and the Standby mode is flawlessly stable. I can find little to complain about except that Windows does not allow you to choose which hard drive the Hibernate image is saved- it seems that it has to be saved on the C: drive. I suspect, however, the image location can be changed in the registry. Computers using hibernate can easily boot into Windows 2000 several times faster than those without without. The time-savings can really add up and translate into dollars-saved and white-hairs prevented. The feature alone makes Windows 2000 a very compelling upgrade. If for some reason under Windows 2000 your computer does not work with Hibernate and/or Standby (remember you need an ACPI-compliant BIOS with ATX motherboard/case), I would like to know about it so I can compile a list of hardware incompatible to these two features. If these test results are any indication, however, the list will probably be very short.

Test Bed (System 1): Celeron 466, 224 MB PC100 SDRAM, Asus P2B BIOS Revision 1011, IBM DTTA-350840 8.4 GB, IBM DJNA-351520 15.2 GB, Maxtor DiamondMax 6800 27.2 GB Hard Drives

Test Bed (System 2): K6-2 300, 96 MB PC100 SDRAM, FIC VA-503+ BIOS Revision 1.15JE32, IBM DHEA-36480 6.4 GB Hard Drive

Test Bed (System 3): K6/233, 64 MB EDO RAM, Amptron Intel-TX-based motherboard AMIBIOS revision 8/29/1997S, Quantum Viking 4.5 NSE 4.5 GB Ultra Narrow 7200RPM SCSI Hard Drive on Diamond Fireport 40

All machines using FAT32 and Windows 2000 Professional Release to Manufacturing build 2195





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