Save hard disk space by disabling hibernation in Windows 8

Friday, November 14, 2014 10:20:01 PM

I own the $1,000 Surface Pro 3 i5 with 128 GB hard disk drive. It’s a sweet machine... with limited storage space. WinDirStat tells me that hiberfil.sys is taking up tons of the precious space. That’s it in green.

Capture

Here are the steps I took to disable hibernation and delete that massive file.

  1. Open an elevated cmd prompt.
  2. Run powercfg -h off
  3. The hiberfil.sys will be instantly gone!
  4. Close the elevated cmd prompt.
  5. Open Control Panel > Power Options
  6. For each power plan, choose advanced settings, and under Battery, ensure that Hibernate is NOT selected for either Critical battery action or Low battery action.

See also

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/819-hibernate-enable-disable.html

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/i-want-to-delete-the-hiberfilsys-to-save-some-disk/ef41dcef-ed7a-447f-82da-e04c2b4dae11