Vista Workshop: More RAM, More Speed

Deactivating Hibernation

If you have a large amount of system memory installed, it is definitely worth your while to take a closer look at Windows' Hibernate feature. The hiberfil.sys file, to which the entire content of the system memory is copied when hibernation is activated, is always just as large as the physical memory. In other words, if your system is equipped with 8 GB of RAM, you're wasting the same amount on your hard drive if you never use this feature.

8 GB of hard drive space are wasted when the Hibernate feature is on.

Additionally, with computers nowadays coming equipped with more and more memory, the usefulness of the hibernation feature is increasingly being called into question. After all, it takes more time to write 8 GB of data to the hard drive when the system shuts down and then read it back when it starts up again than simply restarting Windows. Of course, the time the whole process takes depends on the amount of memory in use by the system. If only 1 GB is in actual use, only these files are written to disk.

Windows Vista no longer offers a control panel setting for deactivating the Hibernate feature, the way that Windows XP did. Nonetheless, there is still a method to switch the option off. In the Start/Run menu, type the following command:

powercfg -H off

Similarly, the command

powercfg -H on

allows you to re-activate Hibernate at any time. If UAC is enabled on your system, then the command line has to be opened with administrative privileges.