Hi Matt, Stand-by and Hibernate are two slightly different computer states.
The Stand-by state will keep the computer at bare minimum power, enough to keep your programs running in the background, yet put the computer to sleep, which just happens to be another term for the computer's stand-by state. When you put your computer to sleep, it's like a college kid doing his term paper, then falling asleep at his desk. His head just plops down on his desk, and onto his books. When he wakes up, just like a computer, with a simple poke of your finger, he wakes up, and he's able to resume where he left off in his term paper, and, as odd as it is, just like a college kid who wakes up from his sleep state to find his books soaked through with globs of drool, in some cases, the computer will do the same, as in some instances, Jaws has a poor reaction to the stand-by state after a while, particularly if you put the computer in stand-by for too long, you'll find that the computer will start to lag, and/or Jaws will start to behave strangely. Some have reported that this issue has been fixed, but I'm just going by what others have told me. Now, in the case of hibernation mode or state, you are essentially shutting the computer down, but placing a bookmark on where you were with your work. The computer literally shuts down, notes what the computer was doing at the time, it's condition, open programs and the like, writing all this information onto the RAM memory and powers down, so that when you come back to the computer, it will start up, and you'll find your work is still out waiting for you. Keep in mind though that this state used to be known to have accessibility issues, on pretty much all screen readers, and even some magnification utilities. Now, the important thing here is that in stand-by mode, you cannot unplug the computer and carry it around with you, as in the case of a laptop, where you might want to place it in stand-by to go do something else, then come back to it, after you've been invited to a study party at a friend's house. The minute the computer loses power, the stand-by state is terminated, and all the data you were working on will be lost. Not to mention, you will be doing some irrevocable damage to your hard drive by shutting down the computer improperly, like power outages do. This is not the case in hibernation mode, as you can unplug your laptop and carry it around with you without fear that you'll be damaging the hard drive, as it will essentially shut itself down just have a bit of battery back-up available to restore the computer to it's pre-hibernation state. You get the best of both worlds here, especially with the portability factor, because the low battery alarm sounds while it's in hibernation mode, so you know when to plug it in to make sure you don't lose any work. The other benefit is that if the computer loses power for any reason, your hard drive is parked, and therefore any bumps will not damage it, which is not the case if you place your computer in stand-by mode. I personally have never had any issues using stand-by or hibernation mode, although I do remember having issues back when I was using Jaws 4.51, but that was a long time ago, and Jaws has evolved since then. In any case, I didn't want you to go off with wrong information, then possibly doing serious damage to your computer, laptop or otherwise. Scorpio For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
