jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I've gotten into the habit of Hibernating, rather doing a Shut Down of my computer. I don't have to close any programs and restart them later, and everything opens right up when I restart. If you don't have that feature on your Start/Shut Down button, you can add it. I see mine wants to do an upgrade now.

sjb3

I have Win 7 on a vintage 2011 HP Pavilion. I assume Hibernate is the same as Sleep, which I've always used via the Start button > Shut Down > Sleep. Does the same as you just described; I can just take up where I previously left off.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

One of my computers doesn't sleep. When I click on Sleep, it shuts down. : (

Hibernate completely shuts down the computer, just like Shut Down. The only difference is, it writes the current state to the hard drive so it knows what to load when starting again.

CaltechNerd Loc: Whittier, CA, USA

Hibernating is very different than sleep. Sleep quiets everything down. Hibernation copies memory to disk, then basically shuts down. It's a good feature, BUT!!!

A friend's daughter always used hibernation. Then there was a disk error, corrupting the image of memory. After long conversations with Microsoft support, the end result was that they had to reformat the hard drive and reload windows and all applications and of course lost all data that wasn't backed up (do any college students back up ever???). Since then, I've only used Sleep.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Wow! Quite a little mishap. I'm surprised the messed up disk image could cause so much harm. Something to think about.