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Standby

From Catherine Roseberry, for About.com

Definition: Standby is another option to use when shutting down your laptop. Rather than turning the entire laptop off, the monitor, internal devices such as optical drives and the hard drive aer shut down. Power is still available to the random access memory (RAM). Any open documents or programs are stored in the RAM.
Once you start your laptop from Standby, your laptop will restore power and this will occur in the best order and quite often more than one device is restored at a time.
Resuming from Standby is a very short process and should only take a few seconds when using Windows XP.
Standby is a good method of conserving laptop battery power when you will be away from your laptop for a short period of time, such as going for lunch.
Also Known As: standby mode
Examples: When I leave my desk to find a file or get supplies, I leave my laptop in Standby rather than shutting it down completely.

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