ProductivityPortfolio has an excellent explanation about Hibernate and Standby . To restate the key points: Standby Enters low power mode by cutting off items such as hard drive and monitor Computer is still running Data is stored in RAM for quick recovery You may lose data when power runs out Hibernate Computer is shutdown and is no longer consuming power Data is saved to hard disk Wake up is not as fast as from Standby, but may be faster than Power On. Additional Notes: Check the Power Options applet in the control panel to see if you can turn on Hibernate (in the following screenshot, Hibernate cannot be enabled since there's not enough disk space). To bring up the Hibernate option when shutting down, hold...

The easiest way to shutdown Windows XP with a shortcut is to create a shortcut icon on the desktop (or the Start menu, or the Quick Launch menu) and assign a shortcut key combination. Useful command line commands: Shutdown : shutdown -s -t 0 Restart : shutdown -r -t 0 Log off : shutdown -l -t 0 Hibernate : rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState Hibernate Command line options for shutdown : C:\> shutdown /? Usage: shutdown [-i | -l | -s ...

From http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/09/17/0247246/HDCP-Master-Key-Is-Legitimate-Blu-ray-Is-Cracked : MakeMKV rips most Blu-Rays very easily. If you want to re-encode with compression like x264, Handbrake will do it easily (though it takes about 6 hours at "20" quality on my i7 HTPC). The audio is a little tricky, but with MKVmerge you can just take the stream that MakeMKV gave you and mux it into the video stream Handbrake spat out. Subtitles are tougher because of the way they're done on Blu-Ray, but I find that opensubtitles.org usually has a perfectly-timed SRT file for my rips, most often from a guy called Shoocat. With newer codecs, the text is super-smooth and often looks better than the subtitles on the blu-ray. The only really hellacious problem I've had with moving my Blu-Ray...

This procedure only works for program shortcuts on the desktop or start menu: Right click on the program shortcut Select "Properties" Focus on the "Shortcut key" field, press any key or combination of any two of SHIFT, CTRL and ALT, plus any key MS link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310417

Press the "Windows" key Press R to bring up the Run dialog Enter tasks and hit Return.