My win 8.1 "hibernation" cannot be awakened with the mouse, but "sleep" could. Will this be an good alternative to hibernation? My power button is cantankerous and I do not want to use it as it is often hard to get the machine to turn on. The power button must be used to wake up from hibernation. . If the machine can run safely on sleep this would be a good solution.
The potential problem with only using "sleep" is if you have a power failure the computer will crash. That can be mitigated with a UPS (battery backup). Sleep mode also uses some electricity if that's a consideration.
A UPS is a must for a desktop machine, assuming this is one. The problem I find with sleep is that things will randomly stop working. The sound may not come one, USB devices may not work, and at one point Norton had an issue where it would not start coming out of sleep. I would still recommend a full shutdown every once in a while.
I have been stupified with the problems win 8.1 has thrown at us. I am an XP man, which works fine on my desktop unit. Even post MS support, I have no real no problems with the proper security. My wife's ASUS lap top has been a "cluster funk" , but she needs it for work. I will shut it down correctly once in a while to keep it behaving.
In particular, you will want to make sure the UPS will wake the computer from sleep mode and cause it to hibernate in the event of a lengthy outage. My APC XS1500 will do this with the supplied PowerChute Personal software. Once this is verified as working, it's safe to disable hybrid sleep, which will save lots of writes to SSD system drives.
After getting to know my ASUS 8.1 better I found out that the power button now works almost instantly when I hibernate it from the right side "charms" bar rather than the new ".1" upgrade "start" button. ASUS told me that the power button was covered under their warranty and it is also covered for three years under Best Buy's extended warranty. I asked them if it was covered even if it was a driver issue or my misconfiguration of the "power option" function and they said it would be covered as a hardware issue regardless. Thanks to all.
sleep works fine for me on my windows 8.1 tablet and uses very little battery. just makes sure you don't have extra programs running in the background that could block sleep mode. a few times i left a vpn service or something else on, and the tablet would just turn of the screen instead of going to sleep properly = lots of battery use. also, i think windows 8.1 may have options to put computer to sleep/hibernation and wake up with a different keys, or with a short press of the power button under the power configuration options.
On our ASUS the sleep does not use much energy unpluged; it lastsd 2 days and still reports 86% charged. But I must admit that it is not over-burdened with added Software.