meaning of 'suspend'

[Derek Broughton]

Ajaya Pradhan wrote:

>            In ubuntu, in the turn off menu there is an option for  
>            'suspend', can any body tell what does it mean.I tried it and
>            my CPU power led started blinking.I could not open my computer.
>            Lastly   I forced to turn off and on my UPS.                   

There are three ACPI power saving modes. Sleep, suspend and hibernate. 
Sleep simply pauses the machine.  Suspend shuts almost everything down and
goes to the lowest-poweruse state possible without actually turning off the
power, and hibernate stores memory state to disk and actually turns off the
system.

On _most_ machines, you get out of these states by pressing the power
button - but not all of them work that way!
-- 
derek