What's the difference between hibernation and stand by in windows?

Question

What's the difference between hibernation and stand by in windows?

Answer 1

Hibernation transfers physical memory to the hard drive and uses less power, stand by shuts everything off except power to the ram.  Both are pretty much useless and cause lots of problems about 75 percent of the time.  If you need to save power that bad, just turn the computer off.

Answer 2

When you are not using your computer, or when your computer is being partially used, one of these options is selected. The main difference between them is that putting your computer on Stand By doesn't shutdown the computer whereas hibernating it shuts it down.

Stand By- This option should be used when you are feeling that you won't be sitting on the computer for an hour or so, but you want it on due to time saving reasons, or any other. If you have to make an important and a bit long phone call, you may think of putting it in Stand By to reduce wastage of time shutting it and starting it. It should be remembered that in Stand by your computer remains on, but it uses lesser resources than it normally would, and hence uses lesser power.

Hibernate- This option should be used when you wanna shut down your computer, but you want it start up the next time just as you had shut it. Which means, supposing you're running a few programs and you wanna shut down but you don't want to restart them the next time manually yourself, you can hibernate your computer. It will save the current state of your computer and restart the next time just as you had shut it. This saves time. Restarting it the next time, you'll see that it will start up faster than usual and save your time.

But, Hibernation uses up your system resources, so it is not advisable to hibernate daily, but only when you need to start the computer next time really quick and with the same settings as you are currently running.

Stand By won't shutdown your computer but just minimize  the usage of power, whereas Hibernate will shutdown your computer.

Hope this helps.