Tech-heads and PC geeks care to explain this one in simple terms?

It puts the device and OS in a state between cold shutdown and traditional hibernate.
It was put in place mostly to deliver faster boot/startup times.

Cold boot stops everything. User sessions, services, kernel, power.

Hybrid stops user sessions, but hibernates the kernel.

Think of it like a sleep mode or how you work with your smart phone. You try to shutdown or restart your phone as little as possible. But in order to help on battery drain, most smart phones put things to sleep until you want to do something.

Windows 8 was designed to live across all hardware platforms from PC to smart phones.

There is much more detail but I hope that is a simple explanation that helps.

That will do very nicely, thanks @blueiiznh

Don’t forget you can go to the Power Management options and customize all these different power and sleep settings, complete with time paraters (i.e. “Sleep after 10 minutes”, etc).

Going through all those power settings really helps you get an idea for what the functions do and how you’d best like to apply them for your type of computer use.

Thanks @gambitking but I’d done that ages ago. No mention of what Hybrid shut down did in there, but I’m familiar with the power options in all their glory :)