How to Disable Hibernation on Your Windows Computer

Although most people understand what Windows hibernation mode is, many do not, we hope to explain a bit about it in this article. There are reasons that this option can be quite useful, and just as many reasons that it can be a hindrance. We plan to also discuss how to turn on or disable hibernation within your computer settings if you wish to.

It goes without having to say that each Windows environment is different, and the different setups and versions of Windows do not have the hibernation mode automatically enabled. If you are unsure if your computer has hibernation enabled there is an easy way for you to check, go to your start menu and click on the shutdown option. If hibernation option is there and you can select it (not grayed out), then it is active on your system. If you do not see it, or if it is grayed out, it means it is either not setup or not activated. There are numerous reasons why this would occur, however, the most common is your computer's motherboard bios has been left it in the disable hibernation mode. Reboot your computer and go into the bios to enable it if you wish to use it.

Hibernation is different than the sleep mode as it actually takes an image of your current activity and saves it to your hard drive, and then turns all power off of your system. Sleep mode typically will store activity in RAM and then turn off the monitor or hard drive, but not the power to the computer. Then when you jiggle your mouse it will come back on. Hibernation, you would have to power back up the PC.

It is quite typical that actual desktop users will select to turn off hibernation if they feel it doesn't work properly, or if it gets to be an annoyance. Hibernation could shut down your computer while you are listening to music if no activity is found. On the other hand, for the many laptop users, hibernation is a plus. This could easily be very beneficial to help save battery life.

If your computer is using this function and you wish to disable it, you can perform the following steps to disable hibernation mode (note this is for Windows 7):

1. Click on your start menu in task bar.

2. Open Run.

3. Type in cmd.exe and hit enter.

4. At command prompt enter "powercfg -h off" without "" and hit enter.

Now you have turned off hibernation on this computer. Each version of Windows has different methods and commands to turn hibernation off or on. In the end, it is up to the user if they feel that using this option is right for them.

This article explains how to disable hibernation for Windows 7, however if you use a different version of Windows and need help, please visit Computer Too Slow for tutorials on how to turn off hibernation on other versions.