I set my laptops to hibernate when the lid closes. Entire RAM written to disk, then a full powerdown. Do turn off wake timers and wake on USB (sometimes disabled in true hibernation but not always).
I don't use hibernate either: /Usually/ it works fine, but once in a while Windows just derps getting back up necessitating a full reboot. I don't want to deal with inconsistent shit like that, I'd rather just go for a proper shut down and cold boot so I can expect consistency and therefore reliability.