In theory, it is a great idea to conserve energy by going into a state that uses less power, but still retains the exact state of your system and applications. Unfortunately, my experience with Sleep and Hibernate is that they are a pain the ass, and take forever to boot up if they work at all.

The idea of instant-on, or turning a device off, having it still retain some core functionality in its sleep state and be able to turn back on in the blink of an eye is one of the benefits of tablets and smartphones that set them apart from traditional PCs.

I could power my system down completely, but it takes too long to boot up and get all of my applications that I use fired up and logged on. Or at least it did. With Windows 8, Microsoft can now go from cold-box-completely-shut-down-system to fully-booted-at-login-screen-ready-to-rock-system in less than 10 seconds.

Not too shabby.