What is the difference between Hibernate and Standby in Windows XP?

Standby and hibernate are 2 extremely useful functions that you can use because of the time it saves you from booting up your computer. Once you’re done with your work session, and need to leave your desk, simply choose standby or hibernate. These two sleep modes are fantastic for laptops as well.

But what’s the difference? Hibernate saves an image of your current session with all open applications and files. Then it powers down your computer (exactly as if you had turned it off). When you next switch your computer on, you will see exactly the same applications and files open as you had left them. In this state, your computer is exactly as though it’s turned off — no power is needed in hibernate mode.

Standby is a sleep mode that reduces the power that your computer uses to almost nothing. The keyword is “almost”. When you use standby mode, your computer cuts the power to your screen, hard drive, peripheral devices…in fact, anything except your computer’s memory (RAM) is cut. This is because the RAM will maintain a copy of your working session.

I’ve had people tell me that moving your notebook around while it’s in standby mode will shake up the harddrive when it’s spinning and cause hard disk problems. Utter rubbish. The hard drive is powered down during standby, much less in hibernate mode.

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Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard Dark Pearl (with Soft Touch Technology) Review

Urgh. I wanted to get a new keyboard for myself because I’m using a 17″ LCD monitor to extend my desktop from my Thinkpad notebook, so an external keyboard and mouse makes things easier to use.

I thought keyboards were all the same, and the only difference was the touch or feeling of the keys. Well, I thought wrong.

Logitech has an ultraslim keyboard that has really nice Soft Touch keys — they’re soft of like the keys that notebooks use, so it’s really comfortable and easy to type.

What I didn’t count on what that the key layout was totally different. It’s not like the full 104 key keyboards where the arrow keys live in an isolated area of their own, as with the numpad keys and the group of Page Down, Page Up, Insert, etc keys.

In this logitech keyboard, the keys were all squeezed together. That’s right — there’s no gap at all between any group of keys, arrow keys, numpad, or otherwise. That makes this keyboard really hard to use. It’s fine if you type without mistakes or require very little editing because the main group of keys are FANTASTIC to type on. It’s still by far the most comfortable keyboard I’ve used.

It’s just that the key layout really annoys me. This surfaces when I try to use the keyboard to navigate around (with the arrow keys) or perform editing operations (shift-home, shift-end, delete, backspace, etc). Normally I can do it without even looking at the keyboard, but with this particular Logitech keyboard, I have to actually look down and make sure I’m pressing on the right key. I’ve tried not looking, but I’m always hitting on the wrong key. That makes it really slow and awkward for me.

It got to a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and pried out the less-important keys so that I could regain some of my productivity back. You can see from the picture above that I took out the Insert key and the Numpad 0 key. Things are slightly better this way, but it’s still a temporary measure.

Verdict? I’m going to sell off this keyboard, and get a better keyboard. One which is full-sized, so all the keys are where they should be, but also with the Soft Touch technology, which makes typing such a joy.

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Book Safe to Keep and Hide Valuables (Cash, Jewelry, etc)

I remember when I was much younger, and I happened to watch this movie where one of the characters stowed some secret item in a book safe. The much-younger-me was very much the impressionable and easily astonished kid, and if I don’t recall wrongly, I was extremely surprised when I first discovered the book safe.

I thought it was an absolutely ingenious idea.

Books were meant for reading and I never did explore the possibilities of actually having a fake book to store valuables in. The premise was simple — have a fake book, or a real book with a hole cut into it — and then storing your cash and valuables inside that book safe.

For book safes like that, a lock or combination wouldn’t even be possible. These book safes depend on security by obfuscation, which, is entirely inadequate. The complete system is based on the assumption that another person will not chance upon your book safe by accident.

That said, I know it sure as heck is a great conversational piece. And it’s cool.

Interested? Amazon has it, so you can get your very own book safe.

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Tata just produced the world’s cheapest car

The world’s cheapest car was just produced, in an announcement made by Tata. This small car has an engine of 625cc, and can go for 20km per litre of petrol. It actually looks pretty decent, and sort of resembles the Mitsubishi I. However, if the announcement is accurate, then the basic model comes without air-conditioning!

It was designed for emerging markets though, and was meant to replace scooters, so I guess that’s understandable. It’s quite an exciting announcement, as this will definitely mark a watershed moment in the automobile industry — I’m pretty sure the other automobile makers will catch up with offerings of their own too.

While such a car puts the ability to own a car in the hands of the lower income families, it does pose an environmental concern, especially since it would mean the rise of the total number of vehicles on the road. However, if people were to downgrade from their luxury or sports behemoths to these cars though, then I guess it would be a good thing.

Read the full article

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Switching Off Appliances Still Draws Power

My previous post about power adapters got me interested in electricity and it led me to this article on how there are vampiric devices in your home, sucking energy all the time. I got pretty surprised when I read the article (Read the full article here: http://www.electronichouse.com/article/why_your_electronics_suck_energy/). It turns out that all our appliances still draw electricity even though they’re turned off.

I know that they require SOME electricity, especially things like DVD players which have an internal clock — but did you know that SOME electricity can mean around 9 percent of your total household electricity bill? That’s a lot for appliances that should be already turned off.

Even power supplies like those that are used by notebooks can result in drawing electricity for nothing. Have you ever left a power supply plugged into the socket, but not plugged to your notebook computer? Then this excerpt may surprise you:

Many power supplies are inefficient and result in power loss when converting the AC power to DC power needed by the electronics. These are conversion losses, but there are also no-load losses, when an external power supply may be detached from a laptop computer but remains plugged in. “In that case, the standby load is for nothing, and it is still drawing power and dissipating it as heat,” Meier says.

I have a portable scanner, and this point sure surprised me:

Portable printers and scanners that are operated by software programs often don’t even have off switches, and these can be very problematic if left plugged in. An unused but connected scanner can draw 12 watts continuously, says Meier.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how much power your appliance is drawing, there’s a handy device that can help you. It’s called Kill A Watt, and how it works is that it acts as a middleman between your appliance and the power socket. So essentially you plug your Kill A Watt device into your power source, and then plug your appliance into Kill A Watt’s input socket, as such:

It’s rather useful because you can now reduce your energy costs by identifying the real energy abusing devices in your home. Kill A Watt has a LCD display that shows you consumption by the kilowatt-hour, just like your local utility company, so you can quickly calculate costs. Amazon has several Kill A Watt devices for sale at pretty low prices, especially if you buy low and used!

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