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:
- Open the Control Panel
- Click Power Options
- Click Choose What The Power Buttons Do
- 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:
- Select the Hibernate checkbox
- 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…
- Regain hard disk space by using Windows Update Cleanup in Windows 7 and 8.x
- Restore a Windows XP backup in Windows 8
- How to replace SkyDrive with Libraries in Windows 8.1
- Pro tip: Use an optical Recovery Drive in Windows 8.1
