Hard drives are so cheap these days that I always tell people planning to resell their computer that they should remove their hard drive and either sell just the chassis or bundle a new hard drive with it.

As for reselling the SSD on its own, don't make me laugh. The depreciation of the value of the drive and the obsolescence of the technology at the point at which you sell it will hardly make it worth your while. I wouldn't advise anyone to buy a second-hand hard drive anyway.

I agree with that, mixture, and in fact practice what I preach; I tend to buy good quality items that I then keep for their economic working life but sometimes my needs change and I need to replace them sooner. If the item is a computer, the HDD is physically taken apart (the last one as an educational process for my then four year old twins who were fascinated by the contents) and the platters destroyed. An SSD would be put in the bonfire if I couldn't find an educational or fun way of destroying it! :)

XV105 ....I suspect doing a Heston with a bit of liquid nitrogen could be quite fun.

Hibernation doesn't really work on XP, and even on win7 there are issues with both H and Standby, with loads of drivers crashing etc.

One can hibernate an XP machine a number of times but eventually it gets clogged up and doesn't work properly.

A full restart is always the best way.

I know that this is going to sound like "I had a good thrashing at my public school and it never damaged me" but both my (and 'er) machines hibernate all the time. Only normally do a full restart if updating Windoze... or, all right, if Skype misbehaves again. Works out at two - three weeks, I guess. Talking about W7 pro and XP pro here.

But I guess it depends on how much 'stuff' one has running, and overheads and memory leaks an'all.

I must admit, jimtherev, I'm with you on that. Whilst my XP Media Server's TV tuner gets its knickers in a twist if I resume it from standby (state S3) or hibernate (state S4), the rest of the machine works just fine afterwards.

I have used hibernate on my XP and W7 work laptops for years almost without issue; it's my standard way of shutting down for travel and I can only recall one occasion in all that time where resume didn't work properly. It's quite normal that the only time I reboot is when Windows Update has resulted in an update that needs it. Perhaps I have been lucky with the drivers I need and have installed, but I speak as I find.