Hibernate, what's the down side?

Hibernate, what's the down side?

Especially if I shut it down completely from time to time.

I've never found the need to use it. It would be most useful on a laptop that needed to be shut down frequently while on the move. Otherwise it's a waste of harddrive space since the hibernate storage file can be very large.

It's really just a method of temporarily storing what you're working on without having to shutdown and reboot.

Same here
And I really doubt that you'll find anyone who uses it(and knows it's there...)

It's good in theory, but HDs are still too slow to make in practical. And in the new OSes MS has made it a point to speed up the boot times.

wolfe70--See this
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/...585/27585.html
10GB on my Pc, but I have a big HD.
As fink says, it is a way to have the PC startup after a long hiatus at the place where you left off.

My friend's laptop takes a while to start and I haven't had time to get to his place to see what's running that he doesn't need so I though this might be an option.

Another forum I posted to had horror stories about it so I'm leaving it alone for now.

A lot of those horror sories tend to be with older machines, I've found that newer ones tend to be OK. But there is little difference between Hibernation and Standby.
With Hibernation the conents of RAM are saved to disk and everything is turned off, just as if the PC had been shut down. With Standby everything except the RAM is turned off, and that will give a far quicker shut down and restart than hibernate. It won't do any harm to try Standby - if you find things are flaky after a restart then yopu know that it doesn't work well on that particular PC, but it won't ever do any harm that a reboot won't solve.

I decided to save the space
http://www.softwarepatch.com/tips/hiberfil-sys-xp.html

How do you get rid of hibernation mode? Do you just check the box saying not to hibernate, or do you have to do something more than that to get rid of it completely?

Nope, that's all you need to do, just uncheck the box. Hiberfil.sys will be automatically deleted when you do.

Thanks, i will do that if it takes up alot, i didn't realise it did!

Hiberfil.sys takes up exactly the same amount of disk space as the amount of installed RAM that you have (it's where Windows writes the contents of RAM before going to sleep).

512mb for me then, i have an 80gig hard drive though, but i'll get rid of it anyway, i don't need it!