The Place

Which power down mode do you use most? I usually shutdown and spend ages waiting for the ol' beast to fire up again but the last couple of days have been setting to hibernate and things still seem pretty smooth?

I use stand by, but use Turn off once a week. My daughters just shut the laptop lid without turning off or using standby. No problems with either so far.

If I use sleep the laptop just gets slower and slower each time it fires back up. I think a couple of the firefox extensions I've got installed don't close down properly and just hog cpu. Trouble is I think one of them is the developer add on, too useful to uninstall.

Always use shutdown.

If you use standby/hibernate I think you find the laptop will still use power to keep all the running programs in memory, so if you are running on Batt ultimately it's going to run out of power.

hibernate closes down completely but putting any running stuff in a position to start back up doesn't it? I'm not sure about doing it too often as it seems you can restart without a password, so if it's in the car and gets nicked then all my stuff is accessible immediately. Not keen on that. A fresh start up asks for the password, easy enough to get round but not for oiks nicking laptops from cars which does happen.
On that note a bloke a few hundred yards from us here got shot in the face the other night, we heard the shots but as guns have been going off the last few days was starting to think it was a bird scarer. The police are saying a targeted attack - it's marsh farm so probably one dealer having an issue with another, strangely not many police helicopters this week. It's been quieter than usual

i prefer hibernate. memory state saved to disk. no power required whilst in this state. more reliable when resuming.
with a product like utimaco safeguard easy full disk encryption you are still protected even if you use standby or hibernate.
windows password alone doesnt protect the data on the disk. you can always put the disk in another machine to read it.

safeguard easy aint cheap, but what price your data? i use it for all the laptops at work.