Hibernation

[carlton23]

For years I have always left my PC in hiber but have suddenly forgotten what keys to press to do so. Must be getting old @ 77. Please help.

[chi-chi66]

Hi Carlton...

I press the Windows sign (flag) at the bottom left of my laptop....then,
when the panel comes up...at the bottom to the right an arrow pointing right,
click that and you then have a choice to click.

[ChuckFickens]

Although it does depend on which version of windows.

The above is correct for windows 7, if it's windows XP you'd need to select shutdown from the start menu and then hibernate from the drop down menu on the shutdown prompt.

[ChuckFickens]

that button would be for sleep/suspend as standard unless you change the function of them in the power options to be hibernate.

[ABerrant]

SLEEP puts your work and settings in memory and draws a small amount of power.

HIBERNATE (a power-saving state designed primarily for laptops) puts your open documents and programs on your hard disk, and then turns off your computer. Of all the power-saving states in Windows, hibernation uses the least amount of power.

[ChuckFickens]

No, not at all.

Sleep switches the computer into a low power mode keeping the RAM and CPU powered up (in the case of the CPU it's just kept ticking over) so the active state is kept in RAM, so while in sleep the computer is still using some power.

Hibernate saves the active state to the hard drive and then totally powers down everything on the computer so the computer is using no power during hibernate.

[ChuckFickens]

I should say hibernate uses virtually no power. a laptop still uses a small amount of power even when fully shut down, otherwise the power button wouldn't work.

[ChuckFickens]

it's a software setting, not a hardware setting, it's nothing to do with the brand of laptop

On XP hibernate isn't even enabled by default and you have to tick the option in power settings > hibernate before you can hibernate the system.

In windows 7 (and vista I think) hibernate is enabled out the box but the button is set to sleep by default unless you go into the power settings and set the action for the sleep button to be hibernate.