Best Practice Ezine #67 - Do You Trust Hibernation?

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Hibernation - Do you trust it?

Late breaking addition to original article.

• Chris's Report - Benefits of Hibernation

Background to Hibernate

XP offers the facility to hibernate.  The killer advantage of Hibernation is when you press the power-on button; you get a faster return of your desktop, compared with the traditional shutdown / restart.  A bonus with Hibernation is that you can be lazy and leave all your programs running.  When your machine comes out of hibernation all your programs are still open, whereas with shutdown, you (or XP) must close all programs.

Hibernation sounds great, the way of the future, it also fits in with my habit of leaving machines like the T.V. on standby, rather than turning them off at the wall.  However, as we will see, all is not sweetness and light with Windows Hibernation.

How to Setup and Troubleshoot Hibernation.

If, when you click on Start and Shutdown, you don't see a Hibernation option on the menu, then go to the Control Panel, open the Power Options and tick the Hibernation box.  If this option is greyed out it means that there is insufficient disk space to create hiberfil.sys, or that your BIOS does not support hibernation.  Incidentally, I recently discovered another command line tool called powercfg, amongst powercfg's many options is one to hibernate.

Tip from Chris.  I have found that on the shutdown screen, when Hibernation is enabled, and the Standby / Turn Off / Restart options are shown, you can hold the left shift and Standby changes to Hibernate.

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Reaction of my Class to Hibernation

Now whenever I introduce the Hibernation topic on a training course I get a frosty response.  Most delegates are not impressed with the operating system storing the whole of RAM on disk and thus facilitating the fast return from Hibernation.  Many were under-whelmed when I told them that the XP operating system created a hiberfil.sys file in the root of the c:\ drive.  Only the class creep seemed alert when I mentioned that you need as much free disk space on the C:\ as you had RAM in order to create this hiberfil.sys.

What puzzled me was why people who were enthusiastic about Active Directory, sponges for knowledge about DNS, could turn against Hibernation.  More so, because in the training room, Hibernation always worked perfectly, furthermore, their instructor was always enthusiastic about the topic.  Then one day I understood these delegates reluctance.

Reaction of my Class to Hibernation

Now whenever I introduce the Hibernation topic on a training course I get a frosty response.  Most delegates are not impressed with the operating system storing the whole of RAM on disk and thus facilitating the fast return from Hibernation.  Many were under-whelmed when I told them that the XP operating system created a hiberfil.sys file in the root of the c:\ drive.  Only the class creep seemed alert when I mentioned that you need as much free disk space on the C:\ as you had RAM in order to create this hiberfil.sys.

What puzzled me was why people who were enthusiastic about Active Directory, sponges for knowledge about DNS, could turn against Hibernation.  More so, because in the training room, Hibernation always worked perfectly, furthermore, their instructor was always enthusiastic about the topic.  Then one day I understood these delegates reluctance.

Guy's Recent Experience of Hibernation

About 3 months ago, I began to see why people distrust Hibernation.  When our computer room at home got very hot in the evenings, I decided to switch our computers into Hibernation mode each night.  Approximately every other morning when my new machine came out of hibernation, it would hang.  The only answer was a hardware reset, which probably did the machine no good.  On the days when it did come out of hibernation, the disk thrashing lasted for half an hour.  My wife's machine, which is a different make, faired little better with Hibernate.  So, reluctantly these nights if I want to cool the room, I turn the off the machine with Shut down not Hibernate.

Chris's Report - Benefits of Hibernation

I now have most of my network PCs (150) hibernating at night, then waking up early morning to install windows updates and run Anti virus and Anti Spyware scans. It's a fairly complex solution involving various utilities and scripts. The utility that does the wake up is called 'Shut Down Expert' (SDE) from Zylsoft. The program itself doesn't run as a service so I used to reskit tools srvany and instsrv to install and run it as a service so that users can log off and it still be resident to allow wake up. They then press the power button (that is set to hibernate the machine). The problem with the user still being logged when hibernating is that the reboot I have set in SDE to occur a few minutes after wake up (to ensure that all machines get a restart each day in case of changes to startup scripts etc) fails for some reason. Having the utility run as a service and having the users log off at night then press the button solves this problem. In addition, it makes sure their redirected folders and roaming profiles get closed cleanly. My startup script includes code to change the function of the power button to be hibernate not shutdown. SDE is also set to hibernate all machines after around 3 hrs to prevent machines being constantly on if the user is away. I copy the config file for SDE to the user's PC in the startup script so I if I need to make a change it will quickly take effect globally.

Once used to it my users really like using hibernate facility as their PC's are on and ready to login when they arrive, with no slow boot times and windows updates to wait for - so the benefit is obvious to them. At the end of the day, I only got this going as a 'nicety' - the main thing is that the updates happen (wasn't happening at all before I arrived here). It also gives me the option to install software via GP and do other things early before users arrive to avoid inconvenience to them. I admit putting all the pieces together was a bit fiddly to say the least but now in place it is currently working well on the majority of machines. Some older PCs (6yrs!) won't wake up in the morning but are so ancient they will be retired soon anyway (hopefully!). I do have some odd problems with machines that hang occasionally and other strange behaviour but overall it seems most PC's are behaving well and vast majority are on early morning whenever I check.

Regards

Chris    

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