Illustration: Gordon McAlpin

There are many reasons why you’d want to turn off hibernation on your desktop or laptop. You’re recording a video with a screen-capture utility. You’re watching a movie and don’t want to hit the mouse every so often. You’re planning to run an overnight task, such as a virus scan. Or you’re downloading a very large file.

To turn off hibernation quickly in Windows 7, click Start, then type command and press Enter. At the prompt, type powercfg -h off and press Enter. (To turn it back on, type powercfg -h on and press Enter.) Close the window. Now, your PC won’t go to sleep until you tell it to.