Friday, May 18, 2012

Quick Pro Tip: Running low on disk space? Delete your hiberfil.sys

I freed up about 10GB of space on my C drive this afternoon by simply disabling Hibernation:

Before

After

Step 1: Open Command Prompt as an Administrator

Step 2: Type powercfg -h off and hit enter -if nothing else is output then you've done it right:

Step 3: Marvel at your additional disk space

That's it.

The hiberfil.sys file is a (large) file which stores the the current state (memory) of your computer. You can't just hit delete on it as it's always in use but you can free up a lot of space quickly by disabling Hibernate (you might as well if you never use it):

Quick Pro Tip: Running low on disk space? Delete your hiberfil.sys

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Tags: Software | Windows | The Site Doctor

Friday, May 18, 2012 9:35:30 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hibernate is a feature that I use almost all of the time on all of my machines. It lets me turn them off, but still have a "quick" start-up and everything's just as I left it before.

BUT... like you said, if you don't use it that often, you might as well disable it and not use it. Though, I strongly encourage it's use!

Doug Setzer

Monday, May 21, 2012 8:37:05 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hey Doug, good to hear from you.

Apparently if you're running SSDs you shouldn't use it as the continuous writing to the drive is considered a bad thing.

Either way my boot time is quick enough not to worry about -I tried hibernate for a while before switching it off and it wasn't that much quicker. Clearly you need to get your boss to upgrade your machine :P

Tim