Hibernate, what's the down side? Especially if I shut it down completely from time to time.

Standby & Hibernate Issues in Windows XP Remember this: These power saving features are meant to conserve laptop batteries. If yours is a desktop you will be playing Russian Roulette. i_XpUser

and i always thought 'tis played with some sort of a revolving firearm with only 1 roud in the chamber ... hibernating has known issues (rumour has it that it will experience great enhancements in vista) and not really recommended for desktop pc. save your work and shut down properly to be on the safe side. Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

IMO, the hibernate feature is basically fatuous be it on laptops or desktops, because by nature it was meant to be deployed if you intend to be away from your system for a very long while maybe days. And since the PC is almost turned off in that state, you still have to sit there more or less while everything is turning back on to end the state. Not only that, the Hiberfil.sys file has been known to sometimes cause conflicts when defragging your system. My advice to you is, go into "Power Options" and disable the darn thing and if will be away for that long, turn OFF the PC altogether and if you intend to be back sooner use the Standby feature instead.

When you come out of hibernation, some of your programs you wanted left running will crash. As mentioned above, it takes as long to come out of hibernation as it does to power up the laptop anyway, so no advantage I've ever found in using it.

Here is exactly what Standby & hibernation does (and why it's basically fatuous): Standby shuts down your monitor, hard drive, and other devices, but maintains power to random access memory (RAM). Hibernate turns the PC Off, but saves the contents of RAM to your hard disk in compressed form. i_XpUser

The question should have been.... "Hibernate, what's the upside?" Answer: None To be honest, I don't think standbye is worth bothering with either and have found it to cause more trouble than it's worth. There's nothing like trying to wake up a system in a hibernate or standbye state only to discover it won't and you have to do a hard shutdown and then power up to get back into your system.....hope you didn't leave any unsaved work open. I avoid both at all costs on PC's. I go into power options, disable standbye and hibernate and set the monitor to "Turn off..." after 5 min's and "Turn off hard disks" after an hour. This works better than a screensaver in the case of the monitor and saves a little energy on the HDD's and Monitor usage. Overall, I never shut my PC's down at home so using anything else is moot. Even if I were to go away for a month or more, I'd still leave my PC's running. I run BOINC/Seti and don't want to have my packet count lower.......lol. Also, powering a PC up and down all the time is harder on it than leaving it running.