[philzgr8]

As I understand it, Vista's hybrid sleep mode does in fact mirror the contents of RAM to the HDD in a similar way to S4 hibernate. the difference is that Vista's sleep only uses this for wake IF there has been a power loss in the intervening time. To all intents and purposes the power use of an S4 (hibernate) mode sleep and a standard or hybrid S3 sleep will be pretty much the same.

Also, bear in mind that with most motherboards these days you can set in the bios for the mechine to resume in whatever power state it was before a given power outage. In addition, when set up correctly you do not need to drop to the desktop for the machine to automatically enter sleep mode after the set timeout.