This command can be used to hibernate a Windows machine from some kind of script:
rundll32 powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState
I have found this useful in a couple situations. One is where I have a computer that I like to have on during the day, but not at night. I configured the Bios to turn the computer on automatically each day at a specified time. And then I used windows task scheduler to run the hibernate command at a specified time at night.
The other situation is some problem on one of my machines where it takes literally three or four minutes to bring up the shut down box after clicking start =>shutdown. Instead of doing that, I just created a shortcut on my desktop that runs the hibernate command and it does that immediately