hiberfil.sys

Have you ever decided to clean things up in your computer and just start to uninstall programs that you didn’t use and delete files that are unnecessary? Many of us have and it is quite common to want to clear up some space that is being used by unnecessary files. It comes to reason that the space would be better used by files that do have a use for your daily routine, in what concerns your computer. But you probably also stumbled upon files that probably didn’t make complete sense for you. If you ever wandered around each and every folder in your computer, you probably found hiberfil.sys at one point.

Many people get scared of hiberfil.sys, mainly because they don’t know what it is. The second reason why they don’t really know what to do with this file is the fact that it is a huge file, taking into consideration that it is not an actual program you can use, neither a game nor a movie. Sometimes hiberfil.sys can be more than 2GB. Huge, isn’t it? However, it is not wise to delete this file. This is actually the feature we refer to as hibernation. If you haven’t heard about it, it is a sort of power saving feature that doesn’t require you to shut down your computer just to have to restart it later. You practically keep the computer running, but almost everything is shut down. Also, a picture of the current applications running on the system is taken and stored in the hard drive. Whenever you want to use your computer again, instead of pressing the turn on button, you only have to move the mouse and it will automatically recover from the hibernating state. While this feature was thought to be useful in saving time, many people believe that in some cases, recovering from hibernation takes just as much as restarting the computer, which is not an achievement at all. But why is this file so big after all? Well, hiberfil.sys practically copies the information of the computer memory. This is why if you only have 512MB of RAM, hiberfil.sys will also have a similar size. Depending on the size of the memory, hiberfil.sys will be either smaller or bigger. To get rid of hiberfil.sys, you should disable the hibernating feature.

For getting rid of this feature and of hiberfil.sys, you need to go in control panel, at the power options, where you will find the Hibernate tab. There, deselect ‘Enable hibernate support’ and restart your computer. All done!