hibernation issues

[#1]

Wondered if someone could offer any advice....
My windows 7 laptop, has for a couple of months been regularly failing to resume from hibernate. It either hangs on the windows logo screen, or a blank screen, with the HDD light solid and unblinking.  Eventually it 'may' get to a screen telling me it cant resume from hibernate, and I get 2 options, retry or delete restoration data and restart.  I have tried using an elevated command prompt to remove the hiberfile.sys file, and remake it, which works for 3-4 restarts, but it always reverts to this issue.  The system never has an issue starting from a cold boot, but it does take a good 10mins to be useable.  I have tried defragging, using the system file checker, and chkdsk /f  to no avail.  Seagate seatools dosnt suggest a failing HDD.
I have had the system for a good 6-7 years, and windows has never been reinstalled, so I am assuming an OS issue here, but would welcome any ideas.  My thoughts are to buy a new 1Tb HDD ( the installed is a 360Gb), clone the existing OS, and upgrade to 10 on the new HDD. After this, download the 10 ISO and do a clean install. (assuming I get along with 10)

[#2]

Have you considered using Sleep rather than Hibernate?
If your system takes 10 minutes to start-up after a cold boot there is something wrong.  Perhaps you have insufficient RAM so the computer makes excessive use of the paging file?  Or maybe you have two pieces of competing security software?  Or just security software that is too demanding for your hardware?  None of these issues would be addressed by replacing the hard drive.  That won't do any good at all unless either your old hard drive is faulty or nearly full.

[#3]

Have you done a Windows Disk Cleanup.....
Can`t remember how to do it, ...(maybe RR can give info)... but it was mentioned on another thread a few weeks back, and it is surprising how much stuf you don`t really need is cleaned out on it ... and maybe this could help your "cold boot" time factor...

[#4]

Thanks for replys
The system is an hp g61-410sa. I have upgraded it to 4gb ram. It has an intel celeron processor. The 10mins to boot is from switch on to it becoming useable. It gets to the login screen pretty quickly, and boots to the desktop quickly. Its just the hdd is used alot until things calm down its sluggish. Once its settled its fine. Use cc cleaner fairly regularly and onky use ms security essentials security software. Most things I dont want starting up at boot time have been disabled via ms config. Its like the hiberfile gets corrupted every so often. The hdd has around 85gb of free space out of approx 250gb.
Maybe its just os bloat and it needs a reinstall. As said its around 6yrs old and is used alot, and has never had a reformat and reinstall.

[#5]

Might be time for a new Laptop!
With all the updates that Microsoft send out, most devices get slower and slower, meaning you need a faster system. Adding a new HDD is not going to be any faster than the one you have now - your system will be limited by the processor/motherboard/speed and so on. Three years is a good life for a budget laptop, 5 at most for a top of the range, before considering an upgrade. A clean install willhelp for a while, but as soon as you connect to the internet all those hundreds of updates will slow you down again.

[#6]

4 GB of RAM should be plenty.  An SSD hard drive might make the system faster but a Celeron processor was, I think, bottom of the range when your computer was new.  What happens if you run in Safe Mode?  Does the computer boot faster?  If so there is still work to be done on start-up programs.
Why do you prefer hibernate to sleep?  Hibernate is very passé. 

[#7]

get one of those micro  sized usb sticks that is ready boost compatible it doesn't need to be more than 8gb in size then see if using ready boost speeds up the boot times something like this if you don't want it to stick out and be annoying when you move the laptop around http://www.mymemory.co.uk/USB-Flash-Drives/SanDisk/SanDisk-64GB-Ultra-Fit-USB-3.0-Flash-Drive---130M...
clearly something that large will give you loads of extra storage as well/
if you don't need to worry about a perma fitted stick pocking out of a usb port because you never move the laptop around then get any cheap high speed usb stick and set the readyboost size to 8gb, http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/turn-readyboost-on-off-storage-device#1TC=windows-7
that should speed your start up times up considerably, beaware that if the device isn't specifically readyboost certified then it will likely fail in a few months as its write cycle gets used up so fast, personally I would grab one of those bundles from ebuyer  like this http://www.ebuyer.com/580629-lexar-8gb-usb-2-0-jumpdrive-v20-flash-drive-pack-of-4-ljdv20-8gbabeu4 and whilst I was there I saw this http://www.ebuyer.com/366985-kingston-8gb-datatraveler-micro-usb-flash-drive-black-dtmck-8gb
cheap enough to get and try and fits the bill /
as to sleep or hibernate, I wouldn't use either one out of choice unless I was on the move and needed to save the battery through instant on not quite shutdown, neither works very well over time and everytime you get a corruption in the files its a mare to restart /

[#8]

Will have a look at safe mode and do some timings. Most startup progs are disabledcasxare the services I dont need. Can post a list if that would be helpful.
I have an 8gb stick I can try as a test.
Use hibernate as dosnt sleep still use power?  Started using these as startup was hacking us off. Maybe I should be investifating startup issues. Never had a virus or malware on the system either. (Think ive been lucky)
Dont think it's time for a new laptop.  It would be silly to replace hardware just because m$ churns out so many updates. I did do the update clearout a while ago as well.
Appreciate the advice chaps.

[#9]

OK.
I have actually timed a startup, and its not as bad as I thought.  Takes approx 1.15mins from poweron to the login prompt.  Another 1.30mins to get to the desktop, but no icons. Another 15 or so secs to get icons.  The HDD stops working after another 4ish mins.  I have noticed it takes a good min or so, to get network access when the desktop appears, all I get is a blue circle over the wireless icon in the task bar. 
Programs starting up are :-
Intel common user interface (3 instances!!
Synaptics pointing driver
IDT PC audio
m$ security client
Google Drive
HP Quick launch buttons
All others unchecked (and there are alot)
Services:-
Andrea ST filters service
Com4QLBEx
Google update service
Mozilla Maintainence service
Audio service
Anyone care to comment

[#10]

remove the google entry from startup

[#11]

As others have said - 6 to 7 years with no reinstall would be doing very well. I used to do a clean install every year or so - it's amazing the rubbish a Windoze machine accumulates.
Even new machines can benefit from a completely clean re-install to remove all the other factory fitted stuff.
Then get the HP Support Assistant from their website - that will then update your drivers etc etc.
I have done a clean install of Win 7, 8.1 and just recently Win10 on my HP machines and did the HP Support Assistant and it's always speeded up things.

[#12]

As mentioned in reply number 2 above....
Disk Cleanup.......    
Start > Type in  Disk Clean     when the result appears..... click "Free up space by deleting unnecessary files"    
A small window will appear on the desktop... showing it doing some stuff .... then you get a "report" window... telling you what files and how much room they are taking up...  
Click OK.. ( if you are happy with that )... and let it do it`s stuff again...
There is another option that you can remove all but the latest restore point.... and in some cases, to remove "old" windows files and folders from very early/previous installs...

Additionally, use CCleaner....   if you have never used this in the past 6 or 7 years... it will take a very long time to sort the crud out tobe deleted... so be prepared for that... ...   Just click " Run Cleaner"....  
after it has done the clean.... do it again... often leaves some behind..  

After you have done those..... do a reboot... and see how/if your boot times have changed........

Worth a try....    

[#13]

I'm pretty sure that hibernation only ever worked a few times before it went pete tong and then you had to perform a registry hack and stop using it to get normal boot times.
btw if you buying a new hard drive grab an ssd  or even a hybrid (sshd) one, the speed boost will be a huge surprise especially given the current boot times
there's no reason to buy a new machine if your happy with the current one (apart from boot times)
thing is the age of that hard drive its not wonder its going slow, hard drives tend to slow down as new sectors get mapped out (marked as bad) quite regularly and the available space shrinks bit by bit until your missing half a mb at which point a lot of them give up the ghost,  my system hasn't had a fresh install in 8 years although its been upgraded from xp64 through vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 and finally 10 been through several hard ware changes (new mobo +cpu 3 times, new hdd twice new ssd twice new gpu 15 times new etc) and it still works fine, another pc has been clean installed form an iso disc at each upgrade point and actually boots slower despite having the exact same hardware configuration my moto has always been "don't fix what aint broke" /

[#14]

Ok. Been having another play... Googled around long network setups. After playing around found I had 17 different network profiles some from routers I got rid of years ago. Deleted all but the operational one and networking at least starts up faster. Will do a disk cleanup when I get home later and see what happens.

[#15]

No-one likes to read what I recommend due to time constraints but,
Maybe it's time to back-up your important files and settings onto an external drive.
Then upgrade the hard-drive to an SSD (you won't regret it) as they have dramatically dropped in price and re-install windows 7 from scratch on the SSD.
Your laptop probably has a SATA II drive connection which will work with most SSD's.
Yes, it's time consuming but, having 6-7 years worth of redundant registry entries, isolated system files and probably a huge profile(s) in size will only bog down the system.
It would probably take as long to surgically remove redundant files and registry entries from your existing set-up, one problem may likely lead to another.
I can guarantee you that by doing this, you will not look back.
I done this last year and gave my laptop a new lease of life (more responsive, 15 second boot time to login from cold start) and still going strong after 6 years from new.
Windows will only take approx 15 mins to reinstall but the patches will take a hell of a lot longer via windows update.(that's something we all have to suffer)
There are some great freeware programs to set up your system for managing the SSD also.