Use Hibernate instead of Shutdown to save time

Hibernate is great because it saves the status of your Windows XP session (all the programs and documents you have open) to the hard drive, so it can automatically restore it the next time you power up. The first step to making a Hibernate shortcut is to make sure you have Hibernate turned on.

Go to the Control panel then click Performance and maintenance.

Next, choose Power options, and select the hibernate tab.

Finally, make sure Enable hibernation is checked.

Please note that hibernate will make a file in your root drive and take space equal to you RAM size. make sure you have enough free disk space in your root drive (a root drive is a partition where you have installed the windows e.g C:\) before enabling it.

Now to actually make the shortcut

right click your desktop and choose New Shortcut.

Next, type this case-sensitive command into the dialog box Code:

rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate

click next. Give the shortcut a name like Hibernate and click finish.

From now on all you need to do to enter hibernation is double click the shortcut.

Alos you can put this shortcut to Windows task scheduler so that system Hibernate can be achived at a particular time automatically.