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QUESTION:
What's your feeling about putting a Windows PC in
hibernation?
—
Norm Gewirtz
,
Pembroke Pines, Fla.
ANSWER:
There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to
save time and electricity by using the "hibernate
mode." Let me explain.
Most
Windows users are familiar with the idea of an idle
computer "going to sleep." It's called
"standby mode" in XP and "sleep
mode" in Vista and Windows 7. When you touch the
keyboard, click on the mouse or open the laptop's lid,
the PC awakens. But for laptops, the standby or sleep
modes are a problem, because the PC's battery continues
to run down even though the computer isn't doing
anything. And for Windows XP desktops, an interruption
of power during standby mode causes unsaved files to be
lost. (Sleep mode won't lose files this way, but it does
use electricity.)
Hibernate
is a deeper sleep for PCs that was designed mainly for
laptops. It conserves battery power for a laptop because
the PC saves your work to the hard disk and shuts off.
However, when the computer awakens (by turning on the PC
or lifting the laptop lid) it starts up faster than it
ordinarily would, because its previous activities are
retrieved from the hard disk. Whatever you were working
on when the PC entered hibernate mode returns to the
screen.
The main
disadvantage to hibernate mode is that the PC's settings
don't periodically get renewed, as they do when a PC is
shut down in the traditional way. This makes it a bit
more likely that your PC will have a problem and need to
be rebooted, which could cause an open file to be lost.
For a discussion of the pros and cons of hibernation,
see http://tinyurl.com/yfa5brw/
and http://tinyurl.com/yepbfap/.
Microsoft
weighs in at http://tinyurl.com/ybvupjg/.
Not all
PCs support hibernate mode. Go to Start and, in the
"shutdown" menu, look to see if hibernate is
among the alternatives.
Q: My
laptop's 140-gigabyte hard drive is filling up fast. I
know there are many duplicate files on the disk, and
would like to delete some of them to save disk space.
Are there any programs that can identify these duplicate
files and their locations so I can delete them?
—
Bob Richman
,
Tucson, Ariz.
A: At www.download.com,
you can find several programs, either free or for-pay,
that will locate and delete duplicate files on your PC.
Just search for "erase duplicate files." But
be careful what you delete. Data files you've created
yourself can be erased with no harm done. But with other
files, beware. If you're not sure what a file is or what
it does, leave it alone.
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