[Sven Johannsen]

No, neither are like a laptop. The laptop really does power off, though there is some residual power drainage. You could remove a laptop battery and it would last a long time. Replace the battery and you could reboot the laptop and everything would essentially be intact. (The backup battery on the laptop has to keep a very small amount of data intact). All of the settings are stored on the hard drive.

The laptop in suspend is a bit more like a PDA, either Palm or PPC. The kicker on the PDA's is that the operating system and many personalization settings are always in RAM, so that you get the instant on effect. That RAM needs to be powered, and that will drain the battery. There can be processes running even when suspended that can drain the battery more quickly. Some of them should be running, the one that is checking the time and seeing if there are any alarms that need to be accted on for example, and there are others that shouldn't still be running, screen refresh processing for a program that is backgrounded for instance. The latter can be due to less than optimal programming.

If you are really not going to use your PPC for a good while, it doesn't hurt to soft rest the device before powering it off (suspending it). That would ensure that the minimal number of processes are running and thereby use the minimal processor time, which equates to power use. Do be aware that anything that was open when you soft reset, is unceremoneously stopped. If you were half way through an essay in Word, openned excell to get some numbers (which backgrounds word in the current state) and then soft reset, your essay is gone. If you close your essay, and get back to the Word file list, then soft reset, you are OK.