GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?
Playing with Vista a little more this evening, and I clear some disk space to do some shrinking and expanding of partitions. The "Disk Cleanup" tool has a tempting 1.5GB that I can release by disabling Hibernate - which I've done, simply to free up a little space temporarily.
Okay, now that I've done the thing that used all that space, I want to re-add Hibernation as an option. Disk Cleanup of course isn't offering this any more, because I've already reclaimed the space. Power options aren't giving me the ability to re-enable Hibernate, either. I'm going nuts trying to find this, and the help file is no help.
The KB is the only place to offer a ray of sunshine, with article KB 920730, "How to disable and renable hibernation on a computer that is running Windows Vista".
The secret is to open a command prompt as Administrator (why can't I right-click on that Command Prompt shortcut in my Start bar and Run As Administrator from there?), and then issue the command "powercfg -hibernate on" ("powercfg -h on" will work as well).
Of course, if you don't open the command prompt as Administrator, it won't actually prompt for elevation, it'll simply tell you "You do not have permission to enable or disable the Hibernate feature."
It's little things like this that suggest a lack of completeness on this OS - not just that the GUI doesn't exist, but that you have to open an elevated Command Prompt (not the easiest thing in the world) in order to enable hibernation on a laptop computer.
Don't get me wrong - Vista is not, as I've heard some people say, "the next Windows ME" - and I would definitely urge early adopters to get into it now, for some really cool features (BitLocker is a must have on a laptop). But Vista does have a few sharp corners in it still.