2.5. Start  (Sleep) The  button, at the bottom of the Start menu's right column, is the trigger for one of Vista's most useful new features, Sleep mode. Yes, that's right: one of the best things about Vista is how it behaves when you turn it off . Millions of people shut their PCs off every day, but they shouldn't; it's a huge, colossal waste of time on both ends. When you shut down, you have to wait for all your programs to closeand then the next morning, you have to reopen everything, reposition your windows , and get everything back the way you had it. Millions of other people, therefore, avoid the whole problem by leaving their computers on all the time. That, of course, represents a massive waste of electricity and isn't great for the environment. A new Vista feature called Sleep solves the dilemma neatly. The instant you put the computer to sleep, Vista quietly transfers a copy of everything in memory into an invisible file on the hard drive. But at the same time, it still keeps everything alive in memory, in case you return to the laptop (or desktop) and want to dive back into work. If you return to work within several hours, starting up is lightning-fast. Everything reappears on the screen faster than you can say, "Redmond, Washington." After you've enjoyed the speed of a power-up from Sleep mode, the normal startup seems interminably, unbearably slow. But now suppose you don't return shortly. In that case, Vista assumes that you're really done for the time being. It cuts power, abandoning what it had memorized. Now your computer is using no power at all. The laptop battery isn't slowly running down; the desktop isn't contributing to global warming. Fortunately, Windows still has the hard drive copy of your work environment. So now when you tap a key to wake the computer, you might have to wait 30 seconds or sonot as fast as two seconds, but certainly better than the five minutes it would take to start up, reopen all your programs, reposition your document windows, and so on. So here's the bottom line: when you're done working for the momentor for the dayput your computer to Sleep instead of shutting it down. You save power, you save time, and you risk no data loss. You can send a laptop to Sleep just by closing the lid. On any kind of computer, you can trigger Sleep by choosing Start .
Tip: Keyboard speed freaks should note that on a desktop or a laptop, you can trigger Sleep entirely from the keyboard by pressing  , right arrow, then Enter, in rapid succession.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Start Stop | | But you wouldn't be the first person to find it illogical to click Start when you want to stop. Microsoft probably should have named the button "Menu," saving all of us a lot of confusion. |
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