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I use hibernation most of the time, since opening up and closing all related files takes about 10-15 minutes every time. So hibernation it is?

However, it is so slooooooo ... wait for it .... wait for it ... just a bit more .... ow!

Are there any ways to speed up that process a bit?

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    I hope it is faster than shutdown/restart! Is it time to upgrade ton Win7? hibernation appears much faster and the OS in general is snappier (to me)
    – uSlackr
    Oct 11, 2011 at 17:16
  • @uSlackr - Faster than shutdown? No, not really. Takes about 6 minutes (hibernation). Unfortunatelly, I don't have that option (yet). I have some software which keeps me hanging with XP (besides, with which I'm satisfied with) which others in my company depend on.
    – Rook
    Oct 11, 2011 at 17:50
  • If you're on a desktop computer, you can use Sleep instead of Hibernate. And as uSlackr said, Windows 7's hibernation is a good deal faster.
    – Hand-E-Food
    Oct 12, 2011 at 3:17
  • @Hand-E-Food - Laptop ... (with a 1h battery :/
    – Rook
    Oct 12, 2011 at 3:55
  • Vista/7 also have Hybrid Sleep. It's a suspend with a fallback to Hibernation in case of a power failure. This is what I recommend.
    – surfasb
    Oct 12, 2011 at 10:43

3 Answers 3

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Hibernation saves your entire RAM contents to the boot drive (It cannot be put elsewhere), so therefore the only way to speed hibernation is:

  • Have less RAM.
  • Have a boot drive that writes faster.
  • Defragment the hibernation file and move it near the beginning (inner rim) of the disk.
  • Have RAM that reads faster.

In Windows 7, there's a fifth option: Have a smaller hibernation file (Read POWERCFG /SIZE) but this risks getting STOP errors and crashing Windows. By the way, as per this link, the Windows 7 hibernate file is 25% smaller than XP's, so upgrading to win7 is a sixth option.

I hear your pain Idigas, by the way, my laptop has 8GB RAM and takes minutes to wake up.

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One way is to use less RAM. Since the hibernation is essentially writing all of the RAm contents to disk, the less RAM the to write. Other than that, make sure the hibernation file is defragmented.

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  • Can I defragment only that file each time I start windows as a background process?
    – Rook
    Oct 11, 2011 at 17:51
  • Remove the hibernation file, defrag the disk (preferably outside of the OS), reset-up the hibernation file ONE TIME. That will make it mostly sequential. Then you can complicate that more other unnessisary ways. or technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426 which will do a boot defrag. I have never used this method, and doing it "at each Boot" is a complete waste. Locking the paging file size as noted by force flow, so it doesnt expand and intermingle either.
    – Psycogeek
    Oct 12, 2011 at 6:38
  • The sysinternals tool that Psycogeek provided is the best hibernation file defrag tool for XP and Windows 2003. Note that it does not work on NT, 2000, Vista or later.
    – William C
    Oct 13, 2011 at 3:30
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Make sure your pagefile is a fixed size. That can help a little bit.

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