Putting Your Computer into Hibernation Mode Easily

As you may know there are three states that you can place your computer into when you're not using it: sleep, hibernation, and shutdown. Each of these states has its advantages:

• Sleep: puts the computer into a low power state to conserve power or battery life. Use this state if you're only going to be away from your computer for a short time.
• Hibernation: saves the computer's memory to the hard drive then turns the computer off. This mode allows you to resume work where you left off when you turn the computer back on. No power is required to keep the computer in this state.
• Shutdown: closes all the applications, dumps the memory then turns the computer off. Use this state if you're done using your computer, and are going to shut it down for an extended amount of time.

To put your computer into any of these states you can do this from the Shutdown command in the Start menu. although, if you want to quickly put your computer into a sleep state, you can create a shortcut to perform this action for you.

• First make sure the hibernation feature is enabled on your computer.
• Open the Control Panel folder
• Double-click the 'Power Options' applet.
• Click the Hibernate tab
• Make sure the 'Enable hibernation' checkbox is checked.
• Press the OK button
• Right-click on an empty area of the desktop, and 'New > Shortcut'.
• When the wizard displays, in the empty field type: "%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState", and then press the Next button.
• Give the new shortcut a name like "Hibernate", and then press the Finish button.

Now all you have to do is double-click the new shortcut, and your computer will go into a hibernation mode.