Hibernate button in Windows 7 | Talk it up

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Hibernate button in Windows 7

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July 22, 2012
2:32 AM

Neil Berman

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April 13, 2010

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I recently bought a Powerspec B633 computer from Microcenter (It's their house brand, but it shouldn't make any difference – I think it's a Windows 7 issue that I have.) Simply stated, the keyboard has a button with a "quarter moon" symbol on it, which is "Hibernate". If you press it when you log off, the computer shuts down after a few seconds, ie, all noise from the CPU stops. My understanding is that you should be able to restart the computer by just pressing a button, but that doesn't seem to work. The only way to turn it back on is to press the power button on the CPU tower, which is about 10 feet away from my desk. (I know, How lazy can I be?) Apparently computers don't come with hard copy manuals anymore so I can't find any instructions on how use the feature or if I need to change a setting. Hoping someboby can straighten me out. Otherwise it's a great machine, 2TB hard drive and 8GB RAM. Neil

July 24, 2012
10:39 AM

jayesstee

Kent, England

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November 27, 2010

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Neil Berman said
"My understanding is that you should be able to restart the computer by just pressing a button, but that doesn't seem to work. The only way to turn it back on is to press the power button on the CPU tower . . . . Neil"

Doesn't work like that, Neil. Whenever you invoke 'hibernate', you are shutting down your computer. The difference from the normal (full) shutdown is that Win 7 saves everything in memory to a file (hyberfil.sys) so that the memory and hence all the loaded apps. etc. can be restored.

Since the machine is actually shut down, there is no power to the mother board and hence no processor activity to check when your 'hibernate' key is pressed.

It is probably possible to alter your key to give the 'sleep' option instead. This can be done via the 'power option' in the control panel. Under 'sleep' the machine could be awoken by pressing any key, because it has never actually shut down.

Hope this helps.