How long can I leave my computer in Hibernation?

Question

I've heard that you can't leave it in Hibernation for too long, but what is the real truth?

Answer 1

Standby and hibernation are two alternatives that are particularly important for laptop users seeking to conserve battery life. Rather than logging off from a user session and turning off the computer, you can choose either standby or hibernate. Windows XP significantly increases the speed of going into and coming out of standby and hibernate.

Standby is a low power state from which you can resume working with your desktop and applications intact. When using standby the contents in memory are kept in volatile RAM. Many newer laptops resume from standby in less than two seconds. Hibernation saves the contents in memory to disk in compressed form, allowing the computer to be turned completely off. Again, you can resume with your desktop and applications intact. Many newer laptops resume from hibernate in 20 seconds to 30 seconds, but the actual time it takes to do this is heavily dependent upon the contents in memory at the time you choose to hibernate your computer.


n hibernation can b resumed netime.. it has no time limit

Answer 2

You can potentially leave it in hibernation as long as you want. When you hibernate all the memory/RAM data is written to your disk/HDD and hence when you switch on your computer the next time all the data is loaded back and system state restored.

Answer 3

You can leave it in hibernation as long as you have battery power. The file hyberfil.sys keeps the state of the computer by writing the memory to that file.

Answer 4

Theoretically forever, but every week or so it's a good idea to restart beacuse otherwise your RAM becomes cluttered and starts causing some problems, maybe noticeable, maybe not.

Answer 5

Not true. Use it as long as you want, it makes your computer start up faster. I use this instead of shut down, but do a restart about once week or windows gets cranky.

Answer 6

Till the power fails.