Vista And Hard Drive Space: How To Get More Out Of It

[Saint_Michael 3]

Well I thought I do some cleaning on my hard drive using the basic tools such as disk cleaner, and McAfee's version of that as well; however, when I ran disk cleaner I stumbled upon a interesting "hidden" file called Hibernation File Cleaner. Of course your going to ask what is a Hibernation File Cleaner? Well from the blurb I got about this file in the disk cleaner is that this file stores the hibernations settings for your computer when you put it into hibernation mode if you plan to work on something.

 

It also comes with 1.98Gb file size as well, but what should we do with this waste of space? Well in the blurb they tell you if you don't use hibernation you can simply delete the file, but in line is the problem if you delete the file you completely disable hibernation (thats open for interpretation), and so my search begins. So from what I found the size of the file is determined by the size of your RAM and since I have two gigs of RAM in this computer that file will be up to 2 gigs in size. However, another problems arrives I am getting conflicting website about how disabled hibernation gets if you delete this file so I left a question at one of the sites to see what happens.

 

Anyways..

 

so I tried out one of the tutorials to disable hibernation through command prompt and I check my hard drive and OMG I went from 185Gb to 219GB so it seems this little bundle of joy takes up a bunch of hard drive space, 34 GB of hard drive space was restored after disabling hibernation. So that brings me the user into a small dilemma and that is do I want to disable something that could save me energy while I am away for a few minutes (if I am gone I just turn it off) or keep it off and use the free space for something else (which I won't because my laptop has all that I need)?

 

So ask yourself that question when you use this and see if it would cater to your needs, for now I am keeping it enabled just because some of my family members don't know when to shut it off when they leave or go to bed.

 

I know after reading all that your waiting for this bundle of joy called the process on doing this well here it is.

 

1) Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories.

2) Select Command Prompt and then Right-click this entry and select Run as administrator (which is gay by the way since you would be under a admin account anyways)

3) At the command prompt, type powercfg -h off.

 

Although there is a step 4 to this and that is to test to see if its disable don't bother it is if you do it right. Best way to know if is have the My Computer folder open and remember the size of your hard drive before you do it, and then refresh the folder after you do it and you will see a increase of hard drive space. Of course if want to re-enabled it replace powercfg -h off with powercfg -h on.

 

So there you go this simple little procedure will score you some more hard drive space.

 

EDIT Ok the amount of space you will receive is only 2GB as McAfee cleaned up 32 GB of junk on this computer. So disregard my rant of joy about that.

Edited December 2, 2007 by Saint_Michael (see edit history)