When I installed Windows 8 for the first time, I was very excited about its new hybrid hibernate feature which is a combination of sleep and hibernation states from the earlier versions of Windows. But after installing Windows 8, I tried to restart it several times only to find out that my older motherboard does not support hybrid hibernation mode. Consequently, it takes a longer time for Windows 8 to shutdown and then start up on my computer. If you want to know whether your system supports all those sleep and hibernate modes, then you can make use of the free Passmark Sleeper utility. This utility can not only show information regarding the supported sleep states for your system, but it can also help you diagnose any problems related to hibernation or sleeping.
The Passmark Sleeper software comes as a portable application. You can download the ZIP archive, extract the files to a folder and run Sleeper.exe from there. It does require administrator privileges so that it can access the power settings of your system. The window that opens up shows the various sleep states (S1, S2, S3 and S4) related information – whether they are supported on your system, whether full wake is supported and some options to test out various sleep modes.
In order to test the sleep modes, you have to check one of the sleep modes near the top-left corner of the window and then click on the Sleep Now button. This will put your Windows PC to sleep only and only if that sleep mode is supported. Typically, it sets the sleep mode only for 30 seconds and hibernate mode (S4) for 60 seconds. If the mode is not available, then you can see the error message in the log window. On my test system, only S3 and S4 modes are supported and the PC did not go to sleep when I tried out the S1 and S2 modes.
In the Sleeper configuration, you can choose the duration for testing out various sleep states (you should give S4 state a longer duration as the Windows needs to save the state in files on your hard disk and it can take longer time). You can also choose what to do if your system does not support a sleep mode, choose repeated sleep states through cycle settings and choose some of the log file settings.
The sleep modes can be enabled or disabled in the BIOS / UEFI of some of the modern computers. So if your latest computer does not seem to support some of the sleep states, you should also check your BIOS or UEFI settings first.
Conclusion: Passmark Sleeper can show you detailed information about various sleep modes supported on your Windows PC, helps you to test them and diagnose any problems that could be preventing your computer from sleeping.
You can download Passmark Sleeper from http://www.passmark.com/products/sleeper.htm.