Hibernation

[penagate]

Is it generally acknowledged that Hibernation in Windows XP, although a nice idea and one that usually works, is flawed?

After about a week of using hibernation over shutting down, my computer refused to boot from the system dump - instead, it hung and I had to discard the dump and lose whatever was in it. Also, after booting from hibernation, the mouse motion is always very slow, and the system generally pretty flaky.

I prefer hibernation when it works because it saves me having to save and close everything individually, it is much quicker to start up, and I don't really care about security on this PC. But if this is how well it is implemented, I'm not going to use it any more.

Thoughts?

[thegreatone]

Is it generally acknowledged that Hibernation in Windows XP, although a nice idea and one that usually works, is flawed?

After about a week of using hibernation over shutting down, my computer refused to boot from the system dump - instead, it hung and I had to discard the dump and lose whatever was in it. Also, after booting from hibernation, the mouse motion is always very slow, and the system generally pretty flaky.

I prefer hibernation when it works because it saves me having to save and close everything individually, it is much quicker to start up, and I don't really care about security on this PC. But if this is how well it is implemented, I'm not going to use it any more.

Thoughts?

None of the symptoms you have said have actually happened to me yet, i have left my system in hibernation for a fortnight before and nothing has gone wrong.
The only slight thiong wrong i'd say is that some programs stop the hibernation progress, so, i have to force it sometimes.

To me it is not flawed, i use it daily now

[penagate]

It may be a hardware thing. After restarting from hibernation using Windows 2000, my sound always failed to work. Now I've got a new system and Win XP and it's better, but still not perfect.

For others, laptops especially, it seems to work OK. Must be my luck...

[thegreatone]

Possibley a hardware thing, i mean i've had nothin really fail from using hibernation. Although come to think of it it may be the reason my IE and Windows Explorer sometimes close themselves down, or refuse to open. (Nothing spy/ad/malware related, or viruses for that matter)

Laptops always seem to recover well, mind you come to think of it, my mums fiance had a laptop in hibernation, and when he came to it an hour later it refused to boot from the image stored on disk.
Not sure if its related but you never know.

Anyways,
thegreatone

[si_the_geek]

At the last place I worked there were many issues with hibernation on various PC's, some due to hardware issues and others due to software.

Unfortunately some of the causes could not be found, so hibernation was disabled for all machines in the company, except for certain models of laptops which had been proven to be ok with it.

If it's ok for you then go for it, I personally dont use it all after a few crashes when the machine I tried it on attempted to enter/exit hibernation mode.

[dglienna]

I use it every night with my laptop, and have never had any problems. It's an HP with XP Home. It hibernates when I hit the power button, and sleeps when I close the cover.

[penagate]

Could it be some hardware is actually incapable of fully performing the RAM imaging process (with any OS) or is it just that the Microsoft software implementation has some bugs that show up with certain hardware?

[k1ll3rdr4g0n]

That happened to me to, sometimes when I hibernated, the sound would go away.
I have a mobo with built in sound. Not only that but sometimes it wouldn't come back and I had to restart it without the hibernation. It only seemed to happen when I had a lot of programs open.

@penagate
Did you have a sound card or built in sound?

[penagate]

I had a Vibra 128 PCI soundcard, and Windows 2000, and that didn't like hibernation. With my current system I have an onboard thingy and Windows XP, and it works.

[thegreatone]

I also have onboard sound, Win XP Home SP2. Worka like a charm.

[penagate]

Thanks for the comments everyone