Here you can find the technical jargon behind the various power states offered up by Microsoft Windows:
Restart: the most powerful option in this list, restarting your PC will complete a full Shut down of the machine, including background services, locked file releases, temporary files and caches are cleared. This is a great first troubleshooting step for general PC issues.
Shut down: this option closes all applications and places the machine into a deep sleep, in modern versions of Windows, there is a range of processes that continue to run even after a Shut down.
Sleep: this option suspends all open applications and background processes to RAM and puts the laptop into a sleep state.
