I often hear people complaining about the power-on/start-up time of their laptops and we are now starting to see PC manufacturers offering laptops with 'quick boot' functionality that gets email and web access going before the complete OS is up and running. The OS system vendors are also  focusing a lot of attention of reducing their start-up times.

What I have never understood is what all the fuss is about - every laptop ( and netbook ) has a facility called 'standby' or 'sleep' which shuts down operations but leaves everything in a state where functionality can be rapidly resumed when needed - typically this would be set so when the screen is closed the laptop goes into a low-power suspended state. For a laptop this suspended or sleep state can be maintained for many days and the operating system can be setup to hibernate ( completely saving machine status ) if the battery power drops to a point that the suspend/sleep state cannot be maintained.

Personally I only 'start-up' my laptop once a week  ( or in the case of my MacBook or Linux-based netbook once a month ) so I would much rather the OS vendors focused on other aspects of functionality - application launch time, user responsiveness etc.

Am I missing something here - why do we need to add additional functionality to address a 'problem' that is created by lack of user understanding of current laptop capabilities ?

How often do you power off your laptop - daily, weekly, monthly, never ??

Do we as an industry need to better educate consumers ( and ourselves ) as to the capabilities that the operating systems and hardware actually offer ??