The Deep Sleep
Windows 11 features two distinct low-power states: Sleep and Hibernate. Sleep keeps your current session active in RAM, allowing for an instant resume, while drawing a tiny amount of power. Hibernate saves your session directly to your hard drive (creating a massive hiberfil.sys file) and completely powers off the machine. By default, many Windows 11 laptops are configured to automatically switch from Sleep to Hibernate after a certain number of hours to prevent the battery from slowly draining to zero. While battery-conscious, this is extremely frustrating if you close your laptop lid on Friday evening and have to wait for a full, slow boot sequence from the hard drive on Monday morning.
Preventing Hibernation
To ensure your PC always wakes up instantly and to stop Windows 11 from automatically hibernating after an extended period of sleep, you must adjust the advanced power plan settings.
Press the Windows Key, type Control Panel, and hit Enter. Change the “View by” setting in the top right to Large icons. Click on Power Options. Next to your currently selected power plan (usually “Balanced”), click the blue link that says Change plan settings. On the next screen, click Change advanced power settings. A small, legacy dialogue box will appear. Scroll down and click the plus (+) sign next to Sleep to expand it. Then, expand Hibernate after. You will likely see two options: “On battery” and “Plugged in,” with minute values assigned to them. Click on the minute value (e.g., 360 Minutes) and type 0 (zero). Press Enter. Changing the value to 0 tells Windows to “Never” automatically hibernate.