What is hiberfil.sys?

[Zylen92]

i have formatted my pc. i use a ssd storage device windows programs and drivers. before they only occupied 15gb space. now they occupy 27gb thanks to this hiberfil.sys file. it is 12gb in volume and i cant remove it because it says it is used by something.. help pls.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Go into the power settings and disable hibernation. Once this is done, you can delete the hyberfil.sys file. It is used to store the state of your machine before it goes into hibernation. even if you don't use hibernation, it will be created unless you disable hibernation in the power settings.

 

[davcon]

^+1 exactly!

 

[sminlal]

As you can probably tell from the previous posts, hiberfil.sys is used when you hibernate the system. When the system hibernates, it dumps an image of the RAM contents to this file so that it can start up again very quickly. Because it holds a copy of what's in RAM, it needs to be the same size as your RAM.

Unfortunately, unlike pagefile.sys, there isn't any way to move this file to another drive. The only way to get rid of it is to follow Hawkeye's suggestion.

 

[Zylen92]

Best answer selected by Zylen92.

 

[photonboy]

The Hibernation file is always the same size as your System RAM so I assume you have 12GB of RAM.

When you enter HIBERNATION mode, your System RAM data is copied onto the hard drive before shutting down. On starting up, the system simply copies that hard drive information back to the System RAM rather than starting fresh. So you can leave programs open etc and everything comes up the same.

Shutting down with Hibernation is the preferred method for most people but if your SSD is too small then you may have to eliminate it.

REDUCING WINDOWS SIZE:

1. Disable Hibernation (should eliminate the Hibernate file automatically)
2. Set Pagefile Max and Min to 100MegaBytes (google for how. don't disable the pagefile completely though)
3. Use ExplorerXP to view folder sizes. (for Vista and Win7 you need to find the explorer EXE file and disable Visual Themes under compatibility mode. Simply find it under C:..Program files(x86)... and right-click the EXE file.)

Hope this helps.

 

[sminlal]

2. Set Pagefile Max and Min to 100MegaBytes (google for how. don't disable the pagefile completely though)

Firstly, you should only do this if you have enough RAM. 12GB is probably "enough", but it may not be if you're running a lot of programs that each take a lot of memory.

Secondly, if you do have enough RAM then it's perfectly fine to completely disable the pagefile. I've been running my 12GB Windows 7 system with the pagefile completely disabled for almost 2 years (starting with the RC version) and have never had any issues.

 

[Zylen92]

yhanks for the help guys but i solved it with a different way. windowskey+R, typing powercfg.exe -h off then it led me to erase it