Windows 2000 Power Management
David Yee, 06 March 2001

So what exactly is Hibernate, anyway? In essence it is a technology that allows your computer to boot very quickly into Windows in exactly the same state as you left it before you turned off computer. When you put your computer into Hibernation, Windows 2000 writes an image of your computer's memory into a file on the hard disk, and then the computer is automatically shutdown if your computer is ACPI-compliant and you have an ATX motherboard and case. If you have the older AT style systems, you will have to manually turn off the machine- Windows 2000 will display a message telling you that it is safe to turn off the computer. When computer is turned back on, Windows 2000 will read the Hibernate image into memory. The result is a super-fast boot up, and into the same state of Windows before you put the PC into Hibernation. So for instance, if you were working on a document in Word and a spreadsheet in Excel, after Hibernation those same applications and documents will be right there in the same positions after booting. Very cool. One slight drawback is that extra disk space will be used up, but with today's massive hard drives, that should not be much of an issue. Another drawback is that shutdown will be slower than normal shutdown. As the benchmarks show below, however, a fast computer will hibernate just as quickly as normal shutdown. To get the fastest possible boot and shutdown performance using Hibernate, a full defragmentation of should be performed on the C: drive before enabling Hibernate support. This way it can be ensured that the Hibernate image file will be written into a contiguous physical space on the hard drive.