??? Keyboard Launchpad commands...

um, helpful suggestion number 1

if you use them, do they do the same thing?

/me would consider trying this, but with 18 open programs i dont want to risk an unexpected reboot

sleep just kind of puts your computer in heavy screen saver mode. You can set it up so that the monitor is powered down, the disks power down etc. Hibernate mode takes a snapshot of everything that is running and saves all that info as a file on your HDD and shuts down. When you come out of hibernation, instead of booting everything up, it just loads the hibernation info file and poof, you're right back where you were.

I think that reboot just reboots your OS from scratch, reset actually shuts down the hardware for a moment and is more like a cold boot up.

--- *warning* ---

I could be completely wrong

Sounds convincing enough.

i am sufficiently convinced of werewolf's explanation to watch someone else try this

since I went to XP, hibernate has been working perfectly. Win2K usually messed that up big time. But it's a pretty nice feature.

Thanks, wolfie. Since one objective I have is to power down everything but a number crunching program I keep running.... That would be sleep then?

Sometimes just trying something, one thing looks like the other. But the little details that you don't see make a big difference that you might not know about unless you understand the process.
If that made any sense.

Sleep might work for you. You would have to set up the 'sleep' function so that the monitor powers down, but the disks stay active... if that number crunching proggy needs hard disk activity.

When you leave your comp on for awhile and the monitor goes off eventually... the number cruncher still works. What is that process called?

monitor power down Check your power settings from the control panel and see what is defined there.

Ah... thanks!