ok.. what exactly does stand by do?

on my old hp rig with winME, whenever i hit stand by, the monitor turns off and the fans also turns off, which makes the computer near to silent. my new rig with winxp pro on the other hand, whenever i hit stand by, the monitor turns off but the fans don't! i'm pretty annoyed at this since now if i want to get some silence, i have to turn the computer off. oh yeah, and my cpu temps don't change a bit after comming out of a 10-30 minutes stand by, why is this?

i'm running 1 dual fanned psu, 1 case fan connected to psu, 1 case fan connected to mobo, and 1 cpu fan connected to mobo. is there anyway to turn these off when standing by?

Standby won't turn the fans off. Actaully you don't want them off. Certain motherbaords have a built-in feature that will automatically adjust the fan speeds depending on the temps. Maybe your new motherboard doesn't have that feature or it's not turned on.

i have an asus A7N8X-E deluxe, so i think it shoudl have it since it is one of the more expensive socket a boards... are you talking about the q-fan technology? caues that thing sucks.

Yeah that's what I'm referring to. I don't like that feature either. There's program called Speedfan which is supposed to allow you to control the fan speeds. You could take a look:

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

when I go to standby my computer act like it is completly off. Minus the fact that when I hit a button it does not need to reboot.

Basicly all the fans are off CPU is unpowered. Standby is soposed to put everything in low power standby mod where only your ram is still powered at minual power.

I am running XP pro with a ASUS mobo and an AMD 64 3000+

Standby is an energy saving mode, meaning that the PC will switch the monitor and drives to a low power state. Hibernation on the other hand, actually turns the machine off; but writes the contents of the physical RAM to a file, called the hiberfil.sys, which is the same size as the amount of physical RAM your machine contains (if you have 256MB, then the file will be 256MB). When you turn the machine back on again, your programs and files will be exactly as you left them before you hibernated the system.

nah, i'm using speedfan right now, and i'm not impressed with its fan speed adjusting abilities. Is it wise to go into hibernation mode even if i'm only turning the pc off for like 10-30 minutes? how do i go into hiber mode? Also, like i said, my old rig virtually goes silent when it is in stand by mode. it has a psu fan, a case fan, and a cpu fan... why does stand by mode not work that way for me now?

Beware of standby on your system. We have a 800MHz PIII HP Pavilion. Standby turns off the CPU fan (CPU fan is actually a case fan that uses a plastic duct leading to the large heatsink). As far as I know, only your monitor, video card, and hard drives shut down on standby. Either I'm wrong, or HP has a flaw in a few of their systems.