Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Boot Snooze combines the goodness of hibernation and rebooting


You want to shut down your Windows PC for the day, but you also want it to start as quickly as possible tomorrow morning. Waiting 3-4 minutes to load Windows plus all of the apps that you run at startup just isn't a (good) option. What do you do? You probably just put your computer into sleep or hibernation mode. But there's a better way.

When you constantly use sleep or hibernate, there's a good chance your computer could go days, weeks, or months without a reboot. And while that's not the end of the world, Windows generally works best when you do a reboot every now and again. Data gets cleared from cache files, Windows updates are applied, and programs and services that may have become stuck somewhere between the running and not-running state will be stopped and/or restarted.

Boot Snooze is a simple freeware app that combines the best aspects of a complete reboot with the speedy recovery of sleep or hibernate. Basically all you have to do is fire up this executable file and click the "restart then hibernate" or "restart then standby" option. Your computer will shut down, start up again, and then go into standby or hibernate mode so that when you're ready to start using your computer again you won't have to perform a cold boot.

The program presents you with a 10 minute countdown upon rebooting before hibernating. This allows you to change your mind if you need to. But you can also just start the app and walk away. When you come back your computer should be suspended.

It would be nice if Boot Snooze would let you adjust the amount of time shown on the countdown clock. 10 minutes might be overkill. But overall it's a handy little app, and it's hard to argue with the price. It's available as a free download from the Donation Coder forums.

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