Here at work we recently purchased a Dell laptop. It’s something that I wouldn’t recommend, but it was incredibly cheap, we needed a new laptop and it seemed like good value.And so far it has been, at least for the person who primarily uses it. Having used a Dell laptop before she is familiar with the exact keyboard layout. Performance wise it is quite good (although it is also chunky, which is what happens when you combine cheap and powerful).

Anyway, Dell seems to take it upon themselves to make some changes to the configuration that are quite annoying, including changing the resolution of images so they look all pixelly!One of the more annoying settings is “Hibernate” as the default shut down option. Now, as a laptop the hibernate option is quite useful, but I’m a purist and like to Shut Down Windows whenever I’m forced to use it. To fix it so it will use your last setting you need to edit the registry. (Of course, this problem only affects you if you use the “Old School” Shutdown Dialog, which you are forced to use if you are a member of a domain.)

CAUTION: Editing the registry may screw up your computer, particularly if you do anything other than these instructions, even if you do it could blow up, harrass your family or whatever. The point is, don’t hold me responsible. Do this at your own risk. If you aren’t prepared to do that, pay someone to take the risk for you.
To fix, run regedit and look for the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\System\Shutdown

The name, value pair you want to change is HibernateAsDefault. This will be 0x00000001 (1). Right Click and select modify. Change the value to 0 and click OK. The change will take affect immediately. Go on, try to shut down. For those of you who would prefer it to be the default option, change it to 1 instead.

I’m not quite sure who would use this functionality as most laptops can detect when the lid is closed or the power button is pressed and you can define the action you want for these. Hell, this Dell (hehe, a rhyme) even has Hibernate as a function key (and an eject CD function key, which seems redundant with an eject button on the drive itself).

Hopefully someone will find this useful. I know that I would have preferred a Google Search to answer my question.