Hibernate or turn off?

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Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.

Hibernate saves your system state to a file on the hard drives and powers off the system. Next time you turn the system on, it reads that file and restores the state. It's similar to sleep, but instead of keeping the memory powered and still slowly ticking down the battery, hibernate allows the system to fully power down.

Problems can occur from doing this though, as Windows still isn't the most stable system for dealing with sleep or hibernate. I wouldn't recommend more then a few hibernate cycles in a row. Try to mix it with an occasional reboot.

use standby with the occassional reboot

For sure. I usually turn mine off if I'm walking away from it for an hour or so; it only takes about 25-25 seconds to boot, I got that kind of time.

hibernation is the bane of windows computing - it is the devil. keep away from it at all costs!! (i may be just a little biased...)

I'm surprised at all the anti-hibernation comments. I almost exclusively hibernate - have been since I got my laptop 1.5 years ago. I only reboot when I need to (ie. after software installs mostly).

For me, the advantages of hibernation are:

1) faster boot up time/shut down time (shut down time difference is negligible, I find, with XP). This probably saves me around 10 seconds for each startup/shtudown. Not much, but over time, it adds up.

2) I can do work, hibernate, then pick off exactly where I last left off next time I start up - no need to reopen applications, reset my environment, etc. This probably saves me much more time, depending on how complex my working environment happens to be at hibernation time. I do software develpment, so having Visual Studio or Visual Studio.NET open to the code file I am working on - heck, to the exact line I last worked on - can save me bundles of time. Not to mention other windows (a SQL window for Oracle, documentation files, debug output, test files, ...the list goes on).

I've never had hibernation fail on me - maybe I do something different, I don't know, but I've always found it rock solid. The only problem with hibernation for me is that it eats up as much disk space as you have ram. Right now, I'm at 512meg, so I lose 512meg of disk space. Not a big issue, though.

-Peter

I only see one true anti-hibernation comment here. It doesn't get more "anti" than calling it "the devil"

I think it's just preference and experience. If your running a program taking up low system resources, you lift the lid and it pops up and runs, no problem. I've simply found that when I come out of hibernation and load a game, or Photoshop, my system seems to run a little sluggish; like it won't return the resources back to the RAM, and wants to continue paging EVERYTHING from the disk. Of course, this doesn't seem to be an issue with the XPS, but some habits die hard, and I like the feeling of letting the system refresh everything, reload the dll's and start swapping out unused page files. Just feels like your putting all your blocks back in order.

I agree with psyang. Hibernate come in really handy when you fly alot.

Main advantage is the ability to stop working and continue working were you left off without any complicated procedure or using any power.

Hibernating has been great for me.

mc^2

I'm gonna agree with you guys on that point, as I don't fly much with this unit, and I certainly don't do any coding or programming with it, but I'm not quite sure what the procedure is that makes shutting down, or rebooting "complicated". Hell, if you don't want to hit the start button on the GUI just hold down the power button; or if your obsessed with working the mouse or using hotkeys, set a shortcut link of the Shutdown Shell in the taskbar and it's one click away!

I would say to turn the thing off!!! It's much easier on the damn system.
Christ!!! We pay all this money for our lappys, the least we can do is treat the god forsaken things correctly. I don't know about anybody else, but I ain't made of money. DanFortH, did you get my Intellimouse posts?
You guys are the best.
Peace
Roided

Yes, I got your Intellimouse posts. Stop copy/pasting and posting the same friggin info throughout! I check all the recent threads I post in. It ain't Bluetooth, but should service well. you are certainly forward with your opinions. Watch for the burn my dear boy!

Cool. No need to get snippy
I had 10 eggs, 2 rice cakes, and a glass of orange juice after my workout tonight. (and 2 injections of my special potion)
yeah!!!!!!! God blessed us with food, so why not eat it? See me.
Peace,
Roided

When working in many apps, the procedure can get complicated and time consuming. Save, wait, switch app save wait, save, oops your going to miss the flight. Went from one click to many huh! it's easier/faster for me to just close the lid and off I go. Then open it up and continue doing what I was doing.

Hibernation works well for me. Shut down when you have the time and reboot evrey now and then.

mc^2

Jeez, Roided. Are you juicin' or what? No 'roid rage needed. The whole eggs or just the whites?

Oh, and just so you know,

I'm 5'7" and curl 30 lb. dumbbells. And I'm a woman - mid 30's. C'mon. You can surely do more than twice my weights, huh? And, no, I'M not juicin.

Have fun. Everyone jokes around a bit.

those having issues with Hibernate probably never figured out why.

I used to try and use hibernate, and kept having it crash during boot. Then I figure out the issue.

At work, I plug in a mouse to the first usb slot. and I was sometimes plugging in a usb stick.

When I'd get home, I'd plug in my home usb mouse, not always to usb1. And that's the biggest issue I saw.

When you hibernate, you're not just saving all the programs, you're saving the entire SYSTEM. So anything plugged into USB, Firewire etc., is saved. If you DON'T have that same device (or in the mouse case, I use 2 logitechs, so it's the same driver) plugged into those ports when you try to come out of hibernate, the system crashes because it's missing a device that was suppose to be there.

So I found the problems to be user error, not the fault of the OS. When you think about it, it makes sense. You're telling the OS to "hibernate" and when you wake it open, expect to be in the EXACT same configuration you were in when you Hibernated.

It can be very useful depending on how you use the laptop. If you use a laptop standalone, and never plug extra devices into it, I think it'll work perfectly. It's when you sometimes have an external device connected you'll have issues, since that external needs to be plugged in, TO THE SAME PHYSICAL port, each time you wake up the system if it was there when you hib'd the system

Great point mc^2. I definitely don't travel with time constraints, but dropping the lid is a great feature for users on the run (not drug users, mind you!). Thanks for your info, rogueone!

I think that hibernation is great. Use it a lot. If I'm home I just use sleep, but I take my XPS almost everyday to work and then will use hibernate.

Don't seem to have the mouse problem. I use two diferent mouses, microsoft at home and a kingston at work. Sometimes I forget to unplug before hibernating, and may of had a problem, can't remember. But I will reboot once a week or so just to be safe.

Also, after an hour or so of gaming, I will let the XPS cool down before sleeping, hibernating or turning off. Just a precaution.

I have a i8100 and hibernate works well on that too. XP Pro also. XP and notebooks were ment to be:-)

Thanks for the reply Monkcat,

30 lb dumbells is great. In a recent Men's Health survey, 25 lbs was considered heavy. So great job. Your probably stronger than 80 - 90% of the fat ass men in America. I'm not being sarcastic either. I love it when a dude thinks he's tough as hell and then gets his a$$ handed to him by a woman. There are definitely women that would put me to shame (not many though Between you and me, the only thing I "juice" with is Creatine, Glutamine, and tons of protein. I don't eat the whole egg, just the whites. Talk at me later.
Peace,
Roided

I use hibernate on my IBM at work so I never have to go thru the ultra long login process and re-open my hundreds of apps.