I recently migrated my main work laptop from XP to Vista. Overall, the upgrade went smoothly. However, after the migration was complete I was surprised to discover that the option to hibernate the system was gone. The expected sleep function was there and Vista’s sleep is way better than the XP’s standby option. However,  sometimes you need the system to be completely powered off. For example, when you board an airplane or when you know that the system won’t be used for an extended period of time.

After looking through the Control Panel’s Power Options  I was surprised not to find any obvious way to enable hibernation. The help files point you to the Advanced settings but there was nothing on my system that mentioned hibernation. Fortunately, there was an easy way to reenable hibernation using the powercfg command that you can see below:

powercfg.exe /hibernate on

After running powercfg.exe the hibernate option was immediately available off Vista’s Start menu.