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The “Hibernate” function on Windows XP

12 September 2008 1,625 views 11 Comments



The hibernate function on Windows XP is basically the same as stand by, but with one difference. The files and programs you have open will temporarily be saved onto a specific location on the hard drive, instead of RAM.

This means that the computer can be switched off while hibernating and it will consume no power. When you turn your Windows XP on again, everything will open instantly, just like after a standby. No startup screens and waste of time.

But there is one problem with hibernate – you can only do it once. For some unexplained reason, Windows can’t hibernate severeral times in a row. The temporary hibernate file on your hard drive can’t be overwritten and you need to do a normal shutdown before you can hibernate again. I hope this problem will be fixed in future versions of Windows. (Not sure if it already is on Vista…)

How to hibernate

Another mystery is why the hibernate button isn’t shown on the shutdown menu by default. After all, hibernating is a lot better than standing by -no power consumption, longer than standby, computer can be turned off and makes no noise…

Anyway, to hibernate, go to the shutdown menu as usual: Start -> Turn Off Computer and hold down the shift key to relpace “stand by” with “hibernate”, It’s as easy as that.

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11 Comments »

  • Wailana Yoga said:

    “But there is one problem with hibernate – you can only do it once. For some unexplained reason, Windows can’t hibernate severeral times in a row.”

    I haven’t had any problems hibernating several times in a row. I do it all the time.

    Does anyone else have that problem?

    # 14 September 2008 at 8:01 am
  • Eerik said:

    What service pack do you have?

    # 14 September 2008 at 8:33 am
  • Techie Zone said:

    Tht’s a nice article. Just wanted to add my 2 cents on this.

    The file responsible for hibernation n windows is hiberfil.sys and it resides in system root c:\hiberfil.sys and the size of ths file is almost same as the RAM in the PC.

    Also in Vista you can do hibernation for as many time as u wish without shutting down the PC and I am sure in XP also we can do so. Here the existing hiberfil.sys file will be overwritten.

    Techie Zone’s last blog post..Some Amazing ways to photograph the moon

    # 19 September 2008 at 10:34 pm
  • Lening said:

    I’ve tried it and it works great. Much faster than what I’m used to.

    # 24 September 2008 at 4:50 pm
  • john said:

    I hibernate my xp laptop every day, several times a day. i think i may reboot it or shut it down once a month. works great.

    # 22 October 2008 at 9:57 pm
  • me, myself nor I said:

    This is utter nonsense! Maybe you can’t hybernate multiple times without a service pack or with sp1, but i think every self-respecting person has upgraded their XP to sp2 or sp3. Maybe it’s just your freakin’ hardware, don’t blame XP. It is true that when you hibernate like ten times, your computer may suffer slowdown, but this slowdown is just as big as when you normally leave your computer on for 20 hours and open and close a lot of programs. So i’d say this article sucks. Nothing personal tough.
    ______________
    There’s no place like 127.0.0.1

    # 16 December 2008 at 7:49 pm
  • Jono said:

    Utter rubbish. Pressing shift does NOTHING on my XP SP3 machine. On my old laptop I could hibernate as often as I wanted; as me, myself nor I said, the PC needed to be shut down once a week or so or else it would slow down, but at least I didn’t have to wait 10 minutes for it to boot up every day. I’m gonna continue searching the web for a real answer now, i.e. how to add the hibernate option to the shutdown menu.

    # 17 December 2008 at 2:11 pm
  • Eerik said:

    @ Jono

    Strange…
    It has worked for everyone else.

    # 18 December 2008 at 6:53 pm
  • sorito said:

    it didnt work for me

    # 14 March 2009 at 2:30 pm
  • sorito said:

    sorry it did work

    # 14 March 2009 at 2:46 pm
  • Neville said:

    I’ve got the same problem. I used to hibernate all the time and now my labtop won’t hibernate. It’s like it just forgot how to hibernate overnite. Sometimes the hibernate tab disappears off the the power management dialog too.

    # 30 March 2009 at 3:42 am

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