I usually leave my desktop computers at home in the standby (sleep) mode when I am not using them. It is an extremely low power level but provides for a nearly instant on when I want to use the machine. The screens go into a sleep mode as well.
I don’t have them set to go into that mode automatically as there are times when I have a very lengthy processing job running that may take hours to complete. These include large file transfers for backup and video processing. I can’t have a computer going to sleep in the middle of one of those operations. So I put them to sleep manually when I am done working rather than shutting them off.
“Sleep” and then waking up is usually very reliable and is seldom a problem.
It does mess things up a bit when a computer is “sleeping” and there is a power interruption. That too is seldom a huge problem except for today.
My big quad system was sleeping and the power went off. I like to be there when restarting so I don’t have any of my machines set to auto start. So when I tried a restart I soon realized it wasn’t going to do that. For some reason Windows 7 was not turning the USB keyboard back on after the boot ROM. The keyboard would work when editing in the on-board BIOS setup ROM so knew hardware was fine. A recovery disk would also not boot.
Making a long trouble shooting story short, I had to set the USB ports to Legacy On and finally the keyboard would come back alive after the BOOT ROM and I could transition into the Win7 recovery. It seemed like a strange time to become picky about USB legacy support as it had never been a problem before.
I am happy I can solve my own problems. I can hardly imagine what IT support people have to endure.