Hibernate VS Shut Down

Surprisingly not a great deal of people know about the Hibernate function in Windows. Most people shut down and have to go through the hassle of start-up every time they want to use the computer. Well I almost always use Hibernate.
What Hibernate does is "freeze" your computer the way it is and shuts down the machines. Next time you start up your computer, everything goes back to the way it was. Every program and file you had opened is just the way you left it. The only condition for Hibernate to work is that you have at least as much free space on your drive as you have RAM. If you have 1GB of RAM you need at least 1GB of free space. The Hibernate function just dumps all of your memory into one big file, and when you start Windows again, it dumps it back. It's that simple.
You can configure Hibernate in Control Panel under Power Options. You can make it so when you push your Power button on your computer it automatically hibernates. Or, alternativly you can click "Turn Off Computer..." in the Start menu and then hold down the Shift key. "Stand by" will turn into "Hibernate". Try it :)