Reduce Power Consumption

As laptops became more popular, consumers became aware of Win XP's power settings. Standby left your computer running at low power; hibernate saved all memory to disk and then shut down your system—but often balked at problem programs. With Vista, Microsoft redrew the rules, adding an "away mode" and defaulting to "sleep" rather than off. Sleep mode starts off like standby but saves memory like hibernate. Then after 15 minutes it just shuts off, with no back talk from programs. Nicely done, Microsoft! To shut down completely, skip the Start menu's orange power button in favor of the right arrow next to it.