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Monday, October 26, 2009

The joys of hibernation

5:13 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

One of the greatest irritants about Windows as an operating system is what I call "the grind" - i.e. the process by which, once the system has booted, it crunches away for a while, continually accessing the hard drive and generally bogging down system performance until it settles down. This was particularly prevalent on Windows Vista, and Windows 7 seems to suffer from the same sluggishness upon booting. In my case, it's not helped by the fact that the drivers for my video and sound cards (by ATI and Creative, respectively) are pretty bloated, which simply adds to the feeling that, in the first few minutes after booting, you're not getting as much done as you'd like.

The solution is hibernation, whereby rather than completely closing down the operating system when switching off the computer, a "snapshot" of what is in memory at the time of shutdown is saved to the hard drive and then loaded back into memory the next time the computer is switched on. This completely eliminates the grind, meaning that I just need to wait for the machine to post (20 seconds or thereabouts) and then recover the data saved to the hard drive (about another 10 seconds). Oh, and unlike the more traditional sleep mode, which puts the system into a low power state, a bit like a television on standby, the computer does not consume any power while hibernating.

Unfortunately, for some reason, hibernate has a habit of disappearing from the Windows Vista/7 shutdown menu. To re-enable it, follow these steps.

It's a fairly simple thing, but it results in a noticeable improvement in productivity. Now, my system is up to full speed in under a minute after switching it on in the morning, meaning I'm not left twiddling my thumbs while I wait for the thing to stop chewing on my hard drive. Of course, there will invariably be times where you'll have to do a full system restart (when installing new drivers or one of the larger operating system updates, for instance), but on a normal day-to-day basis the gains are significant. I haven't actually shut down Windows fully since Friday.

3 Comments

 
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