Hibernate is a useful power saving mechanism in Windows platform. When the computer is in hibernate it lets you save all the data in RAM to hard disk drive persistently and switch off the computer. Then you can switch on the computer with exact same settings and opened applications.
In order to hibernate, your computer consumes few gigabytes of hard disk space and it’s permanently allocated. If you don’t want the hibernate feature, you can empty that space and use it for some other work.
I was going through the windows control panel and could not find how to disable hibernate feature and free that space. Narrow shot, I tied to delete the hibernate.sys file and failed.
Few days ago we used the DOS command “powercfg” to get energy consumption report and suggestion to improve.
Quick Catch-up
- How to Save Your Laptop Battery Life?
We can use the same command to disable hibernate feature. Now you know what kind of magic you can do with Command prompt.
Disable Hibernate
- Go to Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt
- Run Command prompt as Administrator (right click on it and select “Run as Administrator”)
- Type the command, powercfg –h OFF
- This will disable the hibernate feature.
- Here after you won’t be having hibernate function in power management window.
- Now restart the computer.
- Now you won’t be able to see hibernate.sys file in your system drive.
- If you can still see it, simply delete it.
- Now you have successfully disabled hibernate and free the hard disk space.
Control the Hibernate File size
If you want to keep hibernate function, but consuming limited amount of hard disk space, you can use –size switch in powercfg command.
- Open command prompt as administrator
- Type command powercfg –h –size 60
- This will allocate hard disk space only as 60% of RAM.
- Minimum amount you can enter is 50%.
- Hardware: Intel Core i5 2nd Gen // 4GB DDR2
- OS: Windows 7 Home Premium // 64 Bit
Tags: #Windows