Hi Ray,
Glad to know the issue is no longer there. The answers to your questions are as follows :
- No, the corruption of a file on system does not mean a hardware malfunction.
- It is not a daily procedure neither a routine maintenance, you may try the steps if you are experiencing issues while waking up the system from hibernation.
Both Hibernation and Sleep are useful in saving power, when the computer is not in use. Sleep is the lowest power state in which the computer is running whereas, hibernate is complete power off state in which the system does not consume any power at all. So, hibernation saves more energy as compared to sleep state. However, the computer might take a while to come out of hibernation as compared to sleep. For more information on power states of computer you may refer to Microsoft article Here.
Please reply if you have any further questions. I would be happy to help you.