Hibernation is a Windows’ feature that’s a middle ground between completely powering your laptop down and putting it to sleep. It uses less power than sleep, but it lets you boot more quickly than a complete shut down, and you can pick up where you left off.

To find out if Hibernate is enabled on your laptop:

  1. Open the Control Panel
  2. Click Power Options
  3. Click Choose What The Power Buttons Do
  4. Click Change settings that are currently unavailable

If you you see Hibernate under Shutdown settings the feature is enabled.

To add it to the Windows Shutdown menu:

  1. Select the Hibernate checkbox
  2. Click Save changes

If you don’t see the Hibernate option, you can enable it from the command line.

Open a Command Prompt window with elevated privileges and enter:

powercfg -h on

To disable it again, just replace the word on with off.

More Windows tips…