There may not be a solution for this, but at the very least I'd like a bit more understanding of what's going on.
When my work (work, XP) laptop comes out of hibernation, it takes an excruciatingly long time to recover. The hard drive light is solidly on, so I'm sure it's just restoring the memory state from disk, but it stays that way for 5 or 10 minutes. While this is happening, I can kind of use the computer. Some windows will respond, albeit very slowly, some won't respond at all. Eventually it starts catching up and I can go about my business, but the time it takes to get to "normal" seems too long.
When I look at disk monitors, they don't show any disk activity, even though the hard drive light is solid, so I'm assuming it's some low level process doing the reading and slowing everything down. Is there any way to speed up the "time to normal"? Is there any way to know when it's officially "done" with recovering from hibernation?
Best Answer
How to troubleshoot hibernation and standby issues in Windows XP
basically, reduce the load before hibernating, also make sure hiberfil.sys is a contigeous file (disable hibernation, defragment the drive, re-enable hibernation).
mind you, XP hibernation at the best of times is a dodgy affair, and the more memory a system has, the worse it gets. laptop hard drives aren't exactly stellar performers, it was bad enough in the old days when laptop had maybe 256 or 512 MB RAM, now with 2 GB and more, it's often unbearably slow.