I’m a huge proponent of leveraging the power management features on your PC – there’s nothing wrong with saving a bit of energy and consequently a few dollars by turning things off as necessary. While many have gotten into the habit of flipping off the monitor, one of the biggest energy consumers actually, when not in use, an expansion on the habit should consist of doing the same with the computer directly. As I enjoy stream-lining and efficiency in my day to day life today I’m going to relay a manner of hibernating your PC with a simple Desktop shortcut.

Right-click anywhere on your Desktop and select New->Shortcut.

For the location of the shortcut item copy and paste C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll, SetSuspendState 0,1,0

Title your shortcut something appropriate.

The shortcut is created and placed on your Desktop but the icon is rather non-descript. Right-click on the shortcut and choose Properties.

On the Shortcut tab click the button labeled Change Icon. By default the shortcut is pulling all available icons from the exe we pathed it to above – rundll32.exe. Instead, we want to look for icons in this file: %SystemRoot%\system3\SHELL32.dll

Now your quick-launch Hibernate shortcut is functional and beautiful – relatively at least.