Some of you may know about hibernation techniques in Windows, but let’s take a look at the positive effects of using hibernation in your computer's life. You might know that each hard drive has an optimal life of some thousands of hours and each time we restart our computers, the hard drive gets exhausted. The hard drive dies down a bit each time, because although the PC manufacturing industry has developed greatly, hard drives are still pure hardware parts, which means they do all of the physical work in our computers.

Hard drives consist of several layers. Some of the layers have sensors and data finders and upon restarting your computer, these layers are involved in checking the boot sectors and hard drive surfaces in order to find important necessary data to run all of your Windows files. This is exactly the process you see after your restart your computer each time. You certainly have seen that even in its best shape, it takes some seconds and in some cases, nearly a minute before you can see your desktop picture.

The harmful effects of continuous restarting of your computer is not only limited to the time it takes before your Windows programs load, but it’s the matter of continuous cooling and heating of the hard drive, the CPU (central processing unit) and the graphic card fan. The ups and downs of these parts make your computer's life shorter.

Now, hibernation has introduced a remedy and a short cut. Instead of completely turning off the computer and disconnecting the power, hibernation saves all of your current information on a hard disk. Upon restarting, the desktop and computer return to the exact phase they were in before you placed your computer into hibernation.

This basically means you are saving battery power and lengthening you hard drive's life, as well as, other physical parts that normally have cooling systems like graphic cards. If you compare the seconds it takes to hibernate and restart from hibernation to those of normal turning on/off, you’ll see hibernation is great for computer maintenance. Hibernation is specifically great for laptop users, because you can save your valuable battery power far more.

Think of hibernation as taking a fast snapshot of everything present on your desktop and then printing them in a matter of seconds. Please note that if you decide to use hibernation for the rest of your PC’s life, you can ensure that you have considerably added time to your hard drive and the battery life of your computer.

Of course, there are certain times when we just have to restart our computers normally, like after installing new software that requires restarting, but for other times, hibernation is the power and time saving friend.

I'm sure this situation has come up for you as well. For example, you are very busy browsing the Internet and have opened several pages and folders on your desktop. You're also listening to your favorite music when a sudden family matter requires you to leave home for a couple of hours. Now, what a headache! If you turn off your computer and then restart it later, you’ve lost all the work you have already completed. This is a time when hibernation comes in handy so you can save your work. It will also save you time down the road.

In case you don't already know how to hibernate your PC, here is a quick lesson.

If your keyboard has sleep button, you can assign a hibernation command to it by clicking on Start, Control Panel, Power Options and choosing the Advanced tab. overnight propecia (XP users have to go to Start, Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance and then choose Power Options).

Once in the Advanced tab, look down to where it says “When I press the sleep button on my computer” and choose Hibernate from the pull down menu.

The other way you can go into hibernation is by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete to open the Windows task manager. From the top menu, click on Shut Down and select Hibernate.