Laptops just like desktop computers are comprised of many different parts which consumes power for them to play their roles. There were times when every part of the early laptops needed continuous supply of power in order for the whole laptop to function, even though those parts were not needed for any purpose during the user operation. For instance, the hard drive were continuously spinning even though no read or write data was on, CPU running at full speed even though system was just performing some light works and so on.
This article will show you some of the useful ways of laptop power management.
General overview of power management
Through the years, tons of work has brought significant improvements to the battery life of laptops and portable devices in general. These days laptop offers to manage their power usage for different components and so on. This is incredibly useful to save power from unnecessary consumption of components until they are used and the power is immediately provided.
To do this, computer step into a low power mode where the device shutdown or reduce power consumption of the part that is not in use or needed and accelerate the power hungry monster like CPU to make it absolutely perfect for the current work load. The process of interactive and cooperative connection between hardware, OS and BIOS is what known as the power management.
Low-Power modes
Computers can be quite unpredictable when it comes down to guess they are on or off under the hood. Most computers that appear to be off, still uses power to some extent, perhaps, in one of them few low-power modes. Low power mode term may differ from operating system to operating system and their version, but the general idea is the same.
When a computer is turned off, the operating system will boot from the scratch upon turning on. If you want to make sure of the legit off mode, there are:
- Mechanical Off Mode, where the system along with their whole components are shut down other than the real-time clock (RTC);
- Soft Power Mode that is like one of the sleep modes, where the most of the components of the system is asleep other than the keyboard, LAN, USB device which wakes up the system.
Sleep mode
Computers, which appear to be shut down, maybe just on, sleep, standby or suspend mode. Waking it up will resume from where it was on sleep.
With the sleep mode your device can be quickly awakened from normal sleep mode. This is also sometimes called suspend to RAM. This is because the system power down everything but RAM which allows the system to save its point of work. Yet, if the device loses power, RAM will lose whatever that was saved in the RAM.
Devices can be awakened from much deeper sleep mode called hibernate mode. This mode suspends until the disk saves everything that was in RAM before the system power itself down. The workplace is resumed exactly as you left it. One of the top side of the hibernation is, this saves way more power than sleep mode and also do not loses its point of paused work, if it loses power.