I never turn off my computer.

Okay, that was an exaggeration but important thing is I got you reading. Now don’t stop just because I tricked you. This tip I’m giving today could potentially save you a lot of time and electricity too.

What I mean is I rarely ever use the Turn Off or Shutdown option in Windows.

Why? Well, there’s no reason for me to.

I use the same programs every day. Visit the same websites. And it’s my personal computer. No one else will actually use it besides me.

So does this mean that I get soaring high electric bills because of an always-on computer? No. Because I use this awesome feature called Hibernation. I even have it set as the default button on my Start Menu.

Note: Some people confuse Hibernation with Standby. They’re two different things. Standby doesn’t really turn off your computer. Think of it as a low-power mode. Hibernation, on the other hand, is a true shutdown but better.

Hibernation basically saves on the hard disk the “state” of a computer before shutting it down. Next time you turn the computer back on, the hibernation file is simply loaded up. After a few seconds, you have your computer up again as if you’ve never turned it off. You can even leave your computer in hibernation for weeks or months and everything will still be there like they used to. (Well, except for the system date and time.) Amazing, really.

If you don’t see this feature, you might need to enable it first. It should be enabled on Windows 7 and Vista computers by default.

With Hibernation, I don’t ever need to wait for programs to close before shutting the computer down. A real shutdown is a huge waste of time. I bet most computer users would open the same programs when they turn their computer back on anyway.

So why can’t I afford to do frequent real shutdowns?

First, the Opera web browser.

I love this browser to no end. It’s blazing fast and I keep several windows of it open. Shutting the computer down (with no hibernation) would mean that the next time I open Opera again, all those tabs will have to be reloaded and that takes a significant amount of time. I use Opera like a file folder to keep all the stuff I’ll take care of at some later time. If there’s one non-native Windows application I have open all the time, it’s Opera.

Second, the Mixero Twitter client. This nifty program enables me to sift through all the noise in the Twitterverse.

If I close this program, all the tweets it loaded that I haven’t read yet will automatically be marked as read. I can’t let it do that for this reason.

But the most important reason of all: I’m a heavy computer power user. (Redundant, I know.) My notification tray is filled with a ton of stuff.

There’s the antivirus, firewall, WordWeb, PicPick, Workrave, Wakoopa, Dropbox and Direct Folders, just to name some. Loading all of these at Windows startup would mean that I’d have to wait no less than 5 minutes before I could actually start using the computer.

It’s also unproductive to have to try to remember which programs I need to have open. Sometimes I start doing something the hard way only to remember a few minutes later that I have a program for doing it the faster way. It’s better that I just have them all open and ready but running there in the background.

The only times I ever do a true shutdown is when I need to restart the computer for Windows updates to take effect. But the great thing is I can postpone that for as long as I want. I don’t need to restart the computer right away just because it got a few minor updates from Microsoft.

I have to tell you though that the computer I’m talking about is a laptop. I’ve been using a laptop as my main computer for almost seven years. Laptops, to me, have become synonymous to computing that every time I use a desktop computer, it feels like I’m in a new world. It’s weird, I know.

Anyway, the bottom line is: any heavy computer user (especially laptop users) would hugely benefit from the Hibernation feature. Use it!

But if you’re on a shared computer, most likely you won’t have much use for this feature. If that’s the case, be sure to turn this feature off to save a few gigs of your hard disk space.

Here are links that would teach you how to enable or disable hibernation on your Windows computer:

Windows 7 – Enable or disable hibernation

Enable/Disable Hibernation in Windows Vista

Windows XP: Disable or Enable Hibernation