Hibernating Windows

Hibernate Rather Than Shutdown

Occasionally you must shutdown or restart your computer, it cannot be avoided. If your objective is to save power or pack up your laptop and go somewhere, you can put the computer in hibernation mode which consumes very little power and prevents any loss of WU progress. Hibernating takes takes a "snapshot" of your computer's state including RAM, running programs such as BOINC and UD, etc. and saves that snapshot to disk. When you resume (come out of hibernation) the computer uses the snap shot to restore itself to the exact state it was in prior to hibernation. Thus, WUs will continue crunching exactly where they left off, regardless of checkpoints.

There are 3 different ways to hibernate. They all produce the same result, a hibernating computer.

Immediate Hibenation

You can manually put the computer in hibernation at anytime. The procedure is very similar to a Shutdown. Click Start, Turn Off Computer, press and hold the SHIFT key, click Hibernate. The computer immediately will saves it's current state to disk, including the state of BOINC and its computations and then hibernates.

back to top

Scheduled Hibernation

Scheduled hibernation puts your computer in hibernate mode at a regular time on a regular schedule. For example you may not want your computer to run all night but you would like it to run until a certain time each day then automatically go into hibernate mode. Instructions for implementing Scheduled Hibernation on Windows XP, XP Pro and probably 2000 and ME follow. This may work on 98 also but I'm not sure.

These instructions are based on a post by davidhobbs in the WCG forums. Thanks Dave! You must be logged on with administrator privileges and you need to have a password set. If necessary, go to Control Panel, User Accounts to set a password for the required account. Then...

  1. Ensure hibernation mode is enabled. Click Control Panel, Power Options, and under the Hibernate tab tick the Enable Hibernation check-box.

  2. Click Start, All Programmes, Accessories, System Tools, Scheduled Tasks, double-click Add Scheduled Task.

  3. click Next to start the New Task Wizard, select Command Prompt from the drop-down list, click Next.

  4. Check the Daily radio-button (assuming you want the task to run each day) and click Next.

  5. Choose the time you want the task to be executed, click Next.

  6. Now you see a box with your username. Type your password once and once again to confirm it, click Next.

  7. Check the box labelled "Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish", click Finish.

  8. Now you see a window titled Command Prompt or Command Prompt Advanced Settings in XP-Pro. Delete all the text in the box labeled Run.

  9. In the box labeled Run type rundll32 powrprof.dll, SetSuspendState. Note the space between the first 2 words and the comma followed by space between the 2nd and 3rd words. Click OK.

  10. Enter your password once and once again to confirm, click OK.

  11. Now you are back at the Scheduled Tasks window. You will see your new scheduled hibernation task and it will be named Command Prompt. Let's give it a better name. Right-click on it, click Rename, type Scheduled Hibernation or something similar, hit Enter to save the new name.

  12. Right-click the renamed scheduled hibernation task again. Notice one of items on the menu is Delete. You can delete the scheduled hibernation at anytime by opening the by opening the list of Scheduled Tasks, right-clicking the task and clicking Delete. Clicking properties opens the window where you set the time for the scheduled event. Theree you can change the time at which the task runs. Now close the Scheduled Tasks window.

  13. You're done!

At the chosen time each day your PC will hibernate, saving the status of all running programs to the hard drive. When you start it up again it will resume from the precise point paused and went into hibernation.

If it does not hibernate at the time you specified then you either set the time incorrectly or you did not enter the same password twice. It will not warn you if you make a mistake entering the passwords. In either case you must open the Scheduled Tasks window as described in steps X to X above, right-clicking the scheduled task and clicking Properties. Change any item and then change it back. That seemingly ridiculous task forces it to ask for the password again.

You may also need to edit the value of the When I press the sleep button on my computer setting found in the Power Options section of the Control Panel, and also on the power functionality available to your computer (ACPI).

back to top

Timeout Hibernation

Scheduled Hibernation may be a little too rigid for you. You may not want to hibernate at the same time every day and some days you may not want to hibernate at all. You may prefer something more flexible, for example, to tell the computer, with just 1 click, something like "hibernate 3 hours from now". In that case you want to download Dagorath's Timeout Hibernator . Instructions for installation and use are included in the package. It allows you to specify an elapse time of 1 to 9 hours. After the the specified time elapses the computer hibernates. Windows has a similar function which you can configure on the Screen Saver page in the Display Properties dialogue. Unfortunately, it won't hibernate if BOINC is running, presumably because Windows regards BOINC as user activity. Dagorath's Timeout Hibernator does not care if the user is active or BOINC is running, it just hibernates.

back to top