DescentBB

Hibernate, what's the down side?

Especially if I shut it down completely from time to time.

The down side? It won't come out of hibernation.

Why hibernate in the first place. The monitor powers off, the HD spins down, the processor underclocks iteself..these are more stable than the OS doing..anything..

Actually hibernate is shut all the way down, the computer completely turns itself off as if you shut down. The only difference is the computer will resume your desktop exactly as you left it when you went into hibernate.

I only use it when I am busy doing something and the power goes out, I hibernate instead of shutting down so I don't have to find everything I was working on once the power comes back. Course that is obviously useless to anyone who doesnt have battery backups.

As of two years ago, I always hibernate, because it boots much faster. I was pushing 280 days without a reboot until we had a power cut, so I had to reboot. I have grown used to the fact I can leave programs and things open, hibernate, and find everything back as I left it the next day.

I see no performance issues doing this. This is Win2kSP4 by the way.

Heh.

But, if you run an AMD low-power CPU then you never need to turn the thing off, because you're already saving all the power a P4 would chew up, even with it turned off for 18 hours a day.

Downside is you can't recieve instant messages or run downloads while you're away.

The downside is it's one more thing that can go wrong and you have a several hundred megabyte or more hibernation file taking up space on your hard drive. Maybe that's not a big deal for you, whatever.

Hibernation file is always the same size as the system RAM, so 1 GB of RAM = 1 GB hibernation file. It is an image of the system memory written directly to the hard drive.

Thanks for the input.