Hibernate or NOT TO Hibernate that is the question

I like the default power settings for Windows 7. If I walk away with work on my desktop, it seems to be timed just right for me to come back and just hit Enter to wake it up instantly to continue.

But if I go away for awhile, even with work on my desktop, I like for it to write what is on the desktop (in memory) to the HD and shut down, so I dont' have to remember if I turned it off or if I saved my work.

Then when I return four hours or four days later, it starts up quickly with everything just as I left it on the desktop.

Apparently it doesn't always enable hibernate by default, so check in Advanced Power Settings to see if yours is on to sample it, both with and without Hybrid Sleep.

Try each for several days regular use to decide which to use, or whether you even want Hibernate since sleep is enough for many who don't care whether machine fully shuts down or want to do it themselves.

I use either Hibernate or shut down. Sleep freezes my computer. Still have not figured it out yet.

But my computer starts up just as fast from either shut down or hibernate. Since shutting it down does not have a tendency to wake up at 3am, I use that.

If I ever fix sleep, I would use that 90% of the time, except when I want/ need to shut down.

~Lordbob

seekermeister said:

Off. Since I live bills paid, I don't feel the need to conserve electricity, and since I sleep on a very irregular schedule and power cycles taking their toll on hardware life spans, my computer remains on 24/7. The only time that I did use hibernation was on XP, but that was only due to the fact that my UPS was designed to use it. As my UPS has aged, it's backup function became unreliable and finally inop.

As I see it, hibernation/sleep would only be useful on a laptop/notebook, but I don't have nor intend to get one, because my PC and I remain very close to each other.

Good point about the electric. Since installing Win7 and using sleep for the first time ever has dramaticlly reduce my electric bill. My wife and I use the computer at home from 6AM to 10PM and we now use the sleep mode whenever we are finished and walk away. Wakeup is quick and my wife like that. So its a Win Win for me.