Windows Hibernate Button

This post was written 2 years 7 months 16 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

If you’re using the Hibernate function (and I’m talking XP here, not sure if this applies to Vista as well) one of the things desperately missing is a matching button in the “Turn Off Computer” menu. You click on it and get options for everything else, but not to hibernate.

Well, not very well known, is that if you press the Shift key whilst on this menu the Standby option will magically change to Hibernate (this is assuming you have the hibernate option activated!).

OR you can add the missing button to the menu. Here’s the code to do this…

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System\Shutdown]
"ShowHibernateButton"=dword:00000001

And to turn it off again…

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System]

Both should be saved as .reg extensions and executed – they need to be run only once. The first script adds a new entry into the registry and the second script removes it again.

Alternatively, download the scripts here from.