This is a little bit “lower tech” than usual for me but it seems to crop up again and again, either when I set up new PCs for people or just when people are asking me one of the usual computer questions. The question being “What is Hibernate?”.

Well, simply, it makes your PC boot up and shut down a hell of a lot faster than normal. For those of you who aren’t obsessed with having the fastest PC, or just use it for ordering the weekly online shop, it will save you a lot of time and make your PC last longer (it won’t, but you’ll keep it longer because you won’t get so frustrated with it).

So, slightly more technical: how does it do this? Well, when you shutdown, everything it the memory (RAM) is saved as an image on the hard drive and this is then loaded back into the memory when you start up again instead of the PC having to go through and load everything up from scratch. This also includes all your programmes you had open and any documents you were working on.

This is absolutely brilliant for laptop users as anything you were working on when your battery dies is still there when you finally get back to your charger. I wouldn’t recomend on relying on them to be there when you boot up though as it is Windows and a few crashes while restoring everything has caused me a few lost files.

I got into work after yet another week off (September has been great - only in the office for about a week) and after the usual messing about of rebooting everything that had been turned off or crashed and not booted up again because they thought that not doing any work was a better option than telling me it was broke maybe?

Anyway, after that, checking emails and making coffee, I needed number 1. Our building is being renovated and before I was off they were just finishing the corridor leading to the toilets and the toilets themselves. I walked out into the corridor and all the lights turned on straight away. “Spooky cooincidence someone getting in the other end at the same time as me” I thought and wandered into the toilets where the lights turned on by themselves…

Turns out they’ve fitted motion detectors to the lights. They’re just a little sensor that looks like a smoke detector. Think I’m gonna have a look on eBay and see if I can get some for home. Let the laziness begin.

Note: Probably not advisable if you’ve got a cat….