Several years of critical power shortages here in Ontario, along with a sense that excessive resource consumption is morally wrong, have led me to power down my PCs when they're not in use. While I'd prefer a partial sleep solution, even standby mode consumes a considerable amount of power (measured not with a watt meter, but rather just feeling the heat of the air coming out of the still running power supply). While Windows XP and Windows 2003 have vastly improved start-up times, once you couple in a large number of services such as SQL Server and various desktop search utilities, along with tools like Visual Studio, getting back to where you were before the shutdown can be very time consuming.

As such, over the past years I've been relying upon the excellent feature called Hibernation. Enabled in the Power Options (as shown below), this gives you a new "Shut Down" option (available by configuring a key in the advanced section of power management, or when holding shift using the XP theme shutdown menu) that basically freezes the state of your PC and then spools the entire memory contents out to a file. On restart it spools the state back exactly where it was, resets the state on the CPU, and then you're off and running again. Getting back to exactly where I was takes just a few seconds.

Back in about 1986/87 a revolutionary product, I believe called SnapBack, for the Atari ST came out that did exactly this, spooling out the state, compressed, to a disk file. Of course, in that case it was generally spooling out 512KB or 1MB, rather than 1GB+, but the idea was the same. At that time people often used it to add "Save Game" functionality to games that intentionally or unintentionally didn't offer the same. Other people used it for piracy, spooling out a running game (after the copy protection checks had occurred), and then giving the file to others.

Just had to mention this as it's remarkable how many people don't know about, and thus don't use, this excellent feature. It isn't perfect, however, and several times it has failed to recover to where it was, so you probably shouldn't hibernate with that document you've worked on for the past three weeks sitting unsaved.