Tech expert

Q Which is better Firewire or USB?

Sunita Kumari

Most new desktops and laptops today come with both Firewire and USB ports. At a very high level, both of them essentially do the same thing, which is, transfer data from one place to another. However there are two big differences. First, USB ports are in general slower than Firewire ports. Second, USB devices are designed in such a way that multiple USB devices can be hooked up to the same USB port on a laptop. This allows laptops to talk to multiple digital devices at the same time using the same port if they wish to.
USB, in fact, is the preferred port used by most digital cameras, cell phones, printers and external storage devices. Firewire is what some higher end digital video recording devices prefer since it requires the transfer of huge volumes of data.

Q When I try to shutdown my laptop, I get an option to “hibernate”. What is this?
Rajesh K
There are creatures in the animal kingdom that sleep for months without burning up too much food. Laptops which are designed to minimise power consumption, often shut themselves down completely after extended periods of inactivity. This maximises the battery usage without recharging. Since a forced shutdown could result in lost work, operating systems today implement “hibernation” which allows them to save the contents of the memory to hard disk. When a laptop is recovered from this state, not only would it seem faster to boot up, it will also, in most cases, preserve whatever you were doing. If you had an unsaved word document open before it hibernated, it would still be open after it wakes up.

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