2 surprising facts that you might not know about your computer

There are 2 surprising facts that you might not know about your computer. Only 2 facts? Really? Yes, 2 big facts that not many people knows about their computers.  

1.     Your Computers draw power even in sleep/hibernate/shutdown mode

You might think yeah, sleep mode might still be drawing power but why is it in shut down and hibernate mode still drawing the power? Aren’t they supposed to be already powered off? Not exactly.

In Sleep mode, computer is still using your computer memory (RAM) to store a snapshot of what your computer is doing before it’s going into sleep mode. If you noticed, when you wake your computer up from a sleep mode, by pressing any keyboard keys or moving your mouse, you always get the thing that you’ve worked on, maybe you’re video or your assignment in Microsoft words or excel. Compared to hibernate, sleep mode is much faster to starts up. In order to achieve that, it will need to draw power to be always in standby mode waiting for any event that can trigger for it to wakes up.

Shutdown mode is basically the state where the computer is shut off. Just imagine that you are dead tired and went into a deep sleep state where you won’t be woken up by simple disruptions.  

 Hibernate similar to sleep mode but instead of always on standby mode it’s shut down. As in sleep mode, your computer will take snapshots of what your computer is doing before it’s going to hibernate but instead of storing it in your computer memory, it will store as a file in your computer hard disk. So, when your computer boots up again, it will have everything that you’re working on. Unlike sleep mode which provides instantaneous resumption, hibernate boots like a normal boot up but instead of starting up fresh, it will restore the computer state from the snapshots it took before it went to hibernate mode.

 So why in Shutdown and hibernate mode still drawing power? There are a few causes of this.

a. Wake-on-LAN: it’s a feature of your computer network card to allow you boot up or waking up your computer from a remote location using the network. The feature requires the network card is powered on and listening to the requests even when your computer is shut off.

b.     Wake-on-keyboard or mouse: to wake your computer up from a hibernate state, you will need to push the “on” button or you can use your keyboard or mouse to trigger it. For this to happen, the computer needs to make sure that the USB input is supplied with power to receive input from the keyboard or mouse.

c.     LED light: LED lights is used to indicate certain component is functioning or powered. Check your computer if it has LED lights near the power supply or if you are using Wifi/3G dongle, check if the LED turned on or not. Chances are there will be LED lights and it draw power to light the LED up even when the computer if off.

2.     Your LCD monitor will get "burned" by displaying the same image all day

Well, it’s not exactly burned down as in fire or blown up. What I meant is that your LCD monitor will get a “burn-in” pixel or after-image when displaying the same image for too long. Try to disable the power plan and you screen saver. Change you wallpaper to a bright colored on and leave it on for few hours. You will see an after-image or in the old LCD monitor, you will get dead pixels.

Dead pixels are spots in your monitor that are either constantly showing dark dot or a bright dot and it is sometimes annoying to look at. Dead pixel doesn’t just go away.

An after-image on the other hand, will linger around for some time even after you try to turn off and on again. We will write another blog post soon to cover how to clear it up dead pixel so that you can prevent unnecessary laptop repair.