meaning of 'suspend'

[Tony]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> 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!
>   
Also I might add that if this is a laptop you are referring to there 
maybe some trouble using any of the ACPI power states in Ubuntu 
depending on your hardware.