by a Thinker, Sailor, Blogger, Irreverent Guy from Madras

Hibernation not only for Grizzly bears


Momma Grizzly may not have killed the Yellowstone hiker [http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-us-canada-14057707] because he disturbed her hibernation; but even if she killed him to protect her cubs, the outcome is the same.  I for sure am a peace loving guy and the worst I will ever do is hold my head when my PC conks off due to the frequent and unannounced load shedding here at Chennai. All the same, the irritating blackouts have made me appreciate the 'Hibernation' feature built in the OS.

Before the TNEB resorted to this irrational load shedding plan, I was one among the multitude who never had a second thought about the Hibernation feature. It was one of the most untouched feature in my PC. But this last month has turned my head around and has me wondering 'why didn't I appreciate it before'!

My work profile mandates frequent walks off-the-PC to take care of other more urgent jobs. Many times there is no time to properly save and power down the system - even with the understanding that the 'called-for-job' might engage me for a couple of hours.

This is also the primary reason that I use tools to work offline; tools which make it unnecessary for me to be always online. Sure, my high speed internet connection is almost always on; but tools like Sylpheed for email, FeedDemon for RSS news and Windows Live Writer for blogging do not require me to be logged into my various accounts - they can be configured to log into, retrieve and log off every half hour or so - easing life while enhancing security.

A month or so before, saving the work in progress was not a priority. Either the auto save feature did its work or I would be back in time to complete and finish up the job. Since a power failure was unheard of in the heart of Chennai, at least, losing the edits was a non-issue. Not so now.

Frequent and unexpected power downs translates to saving your work, manually every few minutes, which in itself is a pain where one doesn't want. Plus such blackouts when unattended corrupt the OS too. This is where the beaty of the hibernation comes into effect.

I have set up the PC to 'turn of monitor', go into 'system standby' and 'hibernate' in 5, 10 and 15 minutes respectively. Admittedly these settings are too low for a normal PC work, but as stated above the unique combination of my work profile and the situation in Chennai make them the optimum selection.

hibernate.jpg





















Now, even when I walk off, my work is saved to the disk every 15 minutes or so and if there is a black out during the time, the system doesn't cry foul during the next boot up. It takes the blackout as part of hibernation and reboots/restores all the windows as they were before hibernating. Cool!
:-)

I don't know how far it is true, but yesterday near a large and popular consumer products and electronics showroom, heard this quip, 'Sale of auto-defrost refrigerators in Chennai, along with the rest of Tamil Nadu, is down. With such frequent power failures, the fridge defrosts every few hours and people don't want to shell out couple of thousand rupees more for an unneeded feature'
:-D

A cartoon on fridge raid in Arctic Circle by Alex Hallatt

fridge_raid.jpg

BTW this post is created with the help of the Open Source blogging tool 'Zoundry Raven'. In first use, seems decent, quick, easy and fully featured - as good or maybe even better than the WLW. But a review would need a few more tests and trials.

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