Bears do it...

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  Bears do it...
  January 5, 2009, 10:56 AM Jay Tedeschi

  Bears do it... but you may not need to. Hibernate that is. 

  If you are using Microsoft Vista, there is a hidden culprit consuming what is more likely than not a good portion of your hard drive.  I knew this, but somehow when I set to the task of building a virtual machine recently to test the newest version of Inventor I neglected to take it into account.  Imagine my surprise upon finishing the Vista\Office install and service pack upgrades to find that the free space on my once seemingly huge 30Gb virtual drive reduced to a paltry 7Gb.

  A quick look at what was consuming so much space on my drive brought it all back.  Depending on your hardware "landscape" you may find that you never use the hibernate feature of your Microsoft OS, in which case it is, at least for most of us, desireable to recover that unused disk space.  Vista unfortunately throws us a curve as hibernation is not a feature which can be disabled from the GUI.  There is a way to do this however via the command prompt, but keep in mind that changes like this require admin privaledges, so you have to run the command prompt "as administrator".

  

  So, go to Start\All Programs\Accessories\Command Prompt and right click to access the "Run as administrator" option.  Once this is done the familiar DOS command prompt window will appear and you simply enter the string "powercfg -h off" which will disable the hibernation feature and get rid of that pesky hiberfil.sys file.

  

  I hope you find this helpful and I hope that you are all looking forward to all the great stuff we have in store for you this new year!

  5 Comments | Add Comment The Gear Box > All, Tips

Comments

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  January 9, 2009 10:31 AM Alex Hatziemmanuel

  Thanks for the tip..... Did you color your hair?

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  January 12, 2009 08:04 PM Jay Tedeschi

  Nope... that one was taken a "couple" of years before the kids arrived Alex. In all fairness to them, the gray started "arriving" all on it's own quite a bit before they did.

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  January 22, 2009 09:20 AM Josh Hunt

  Thanks for the tip, Jay. I was required to install Vista a few days ago and I thought it was crazy that I couldn't find the hibernation settings. Thanks to M$ for hidding such an important setting.

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  January 22, 2009 10:09 AM Stephen Eccleston

  Hi Jay, How much room did disabling the Hibernate feature free up on your 30GB virtual drive?

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  January 23, 2009 09:38 PM Jay Tedeschi

  I think by default it is the same size as the amount of RAM in your machine. In my case it was 4 Gb, which does not sound like much (did I just say that? [grin]) but on the virtual machine it was a good sized chunk.