I found out today how to get rid of the hiberfil.sys file in Vista used for hibernation. If you don't use this "feature" then you might want to get rid of it to save disk space. How this works is that windows saves everything in memory to the hard drive & powers off unlike suspend which powers off but leaves it in memory (which is bad if your computer loses power...you lose everything in memory). Unfortunately windows reserves the same amount of hard drive space that you have in ram (ie 2 gb of ram = 2 gb of extra hard drive space taken up by Windows). In XP this is relatively easy to disable (& hence recover that space); you find the setting to disable hibernation in the power settings. In Vista this isn't in the power settings & windows still reserves that space even if you turn it off. This might be something that you'll want to do if you have Vista on a reletively small drive or partition (like me) & have lots of programs &/or files.

I found the instructions here. First off you need to run command prompt as an administrator, then you type in "powercfg -h off" [no quotes] & hit enter. For accuracy you can cut & paste. Windows will then delete the file & remove the hibernation option from the power options. My guess would be that you change the off to on to re-enable it but I haven't personally tried that so don't take my word on it. The instructions say to then restart but I don't know if that's necessary & I did it anyway. I can say that this worked for me & that I had no problems. It is unfortunate that Microsoft made this harder to do but thats Microsoft for you [I thought that they were trying to make windows easier to use ]; at least it can be done. A further note is that if you just delete the file then you are looking for trouble. I don't know what will happen (because I knew better than to do this) but that could cause windows to crash and/or not reboot or Windows might just recreate the file because hibernation would still be an option and thats if Windows even lets you do it. I just thought that I would share this with the d-a-l community.

So this guide simply tells you how to get rid of the hibernate option? For the purpose of freeing up the 2 GB it reserves on the hardrive in case it is pressed? Just trying to clarify.

Yes this not only disables hibernation but it also deletes the file that reserves the same amount of room on your hard as how much ram you have in your computer. If you have 2 gb or ram then hubernation reserves 2 gb of hard drive space however if you use hibernation this will disable it & you can't use it again until you reverse these steps to re-enable it. After doing this you will have to restart the computer. Does that answer your question?

Yes, thank you. My hard drive is plenty big right now, but it is good to know for the future and as a quick couple GB for people with smaller hard drives! The more you know! Thanks for sharing!

I just wanted to share I have use this command on Windows 7 and it works.