Saving Time and Energy

Posted on: August 13th, 2008

SAVE TIME AND ENERGY (AND THE TREES

Windows XP have a very useful feature called hibernation that can save you time and money.

When the computer hibernates it shuts down but before shutting down it saves the current state of the machine onto the hard drive. When the computer is turned on next time it simply restores the state that was in from the file, usually requiring only a couple of second. So it’s much faster than shutting down and booting up each time. So if you are in the middle of something and have to leave for a longer time you don’t have to close everything and when getting back open everything up again. You can just hibernate the machine and when you power it up you will get back right where you were in no time.

Here is how you can set this up:

- Right click on the desktop on an area where there is no icon.
- Select ‘Properties’ from the menu that comes up
- Click on the ‘Screen Saver’ tab
- Click on the button ‘Power…’
- Click on the ‘Hibernate’ tab and make sure that you have a checkmark next to ‘Enable hibernation’
- Click on the ‘Advanced’ tab
- There should be a section there called ‘Power buttons’ where you can select what should happen if you close the lid of the computer (in case of a laptop), when you press the power button, or when you press the sleep button on the keyboard (a button usually looks like a crescent). There are options for all of these and one of the options is the ‘Hibernate’. I usually set it up so that when I press the power button it hibernates. It’s very convenient and prevents accidental loss of data if someone bumps into the power button. You can still shut down or restart the computer by clicking on ‘Start’ and then ‘Turn Off Computer’.
- Click ‘OK’ to save the changes and close the other window also.
- Test it out

Now you can just flip your computer off whenever you don’t use it and get it up and running again in seconds. This will save you time and money on the electricity bill.

If you don’t have a ‘hibernate’ tab or some other above mentioned feature is missing on your system then it’s usually indicates that the the video driver is not installed, or not correctly installed, or it could be a corruption in the system settings. If that’s the case call a professional to have this fixed.

It also could happen that the hibernation and wake up process takes a long time. It means that your hard drive is not fast enough or, again, there’s some corruption in the Windows. But most of the time it works just fine.

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