15th April 2002
Power management is important, especially if you're not in front of your machine 24/7. I always recommend turning off the CRT monitor when you won't be sitting in front of it for an hour or longer. Or, consider upgrading to an LCD at some point in the future (especially if you feel fatigued at the end of the day). Okay, so what about your hard disk? For laptop owners, hibernation saves time. The current OS environment is saved to a disk image for faster wake-up time. But do you need this? Not necessarily. Clearing HYBERFIL.SYS could free up hundreds of megabytes on any system. The safest way to do this, assuming your OS supports the feature, is to open up the Control Panel's Power Options applet. Flip to the Hibernate tab and clear the checkmark from the "Enable Hybernation" field. If problems crop up at any point in the future, you can always re-enable this feature by returning the checkmark. If your system chokes when ot "returns" from a suspension, consider foregoing power management altogether. To save the most amount of energy, just turn the whole thing off.