Putting Mac to sleep

Anyone know what happens when you put a Mac to "sleep" as opposed to shutting down?

I guess it leaves a small amt. of power to mainboard and everything else for all intents and purposes is shut down/

What is the difference? even when powered down mb's retain a small amount of current.

 

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The main point of any computer (Mac or PC) sleeping is that it can "Wake up". Of course it's down to how you do the settings as to what triggers it to wake up, it could be anything from a mouse movement to a communication through a network device.

It's purpose for waking up is really down to use being made active when it's needed, especially if you are running a system as a server unit and intend to access it remotely but don't want to leave it actively on.

 

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Thanks. So all my drives and fans are shut down/

Do you know what controls this, is it the BIOS or OS...ahh guess it would be the OS.

 

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I understand "sleeping" to mean it keeps the OS running, but makes it run on low power. Like Stryder said, the point of putting it to sleep is being able to wake it up later. If you shut down the computer instead of put it to sleep, then when you want to use the computer again, you will have to turn it on and wait for the OS to load from scratch. If you can simply wake it up, you're ready to go.

 

Well in BIOS you might have some settings for hibernation and wakeup, usually defining what allows wakeup. However most of the settings will be OS based, I'm guessing that sleep would require a small amount of processor use and RAM to turn over while waiting with some hard-drive space being used before the sleep/hibernation to store the contents of RAM or other information within the swap file.

You're fans will tick over and your hard-drive and monitor settings could probably be adjusted within the operating system. For instance not everything has to sleep at the same time, some things can take a little longer to go to sleep however the more that's put to sleep the more that's got to wakeup on a wakeup event.

 

macs don't have a bios as normal PCs does

 

Cheers Kunax. My answer was generalised because of the differences between systems, although I have to admit I don't know anything about MAC's other than they cost more than I'd like.

 

I know, It was just info, I though about editing a little "info:" tag in in front of the txt

 

macbooks are quite nice especially with bootcamp

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, i'm getting an increasing amount of exposure to macs in my line of work :/.

 

That's a good thing Kunax, get as much experience with as many operating systems as possible and you become an extremely handy person, unfortunately let too many people know that and you'll be asked to fix every network related issue when they can't get things to talk to one another.

 

my line of work is server and client support i already help people with all kinds of wierd problems

 

oh yeah forgot about that, figuring out Mac hardware is like starting over. so sleep mode function is handled entirely by OS with no low level firmware calls?

found this link if anyone is interested: http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/firmware/

check this out (see:wake-from-sleep issue: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macbookproefifirmwareupdate12.html

Is the term firmware interchangeable w\ eprom?