windows 7 is eating my hard drive

[amezri]

So here's another weird thing I was noticing... my hard drive space was going down like half a gig every day without me saving anything! Weird. I thought maybe it was some system restore points - about 2.5gb gets used for every one. So I decided to just delete the last few because the system is working fine. Nope, still a HUGE drain. I looked it up and it turns out the hiberfil.sys file is eating TONS of space, about equal to how much RAM you have in your system. Since I just added 4GB, the system decided it needed to eat another 4GB of space for the hibernation file. I have a desktop and I've never used Hibernation or Sleep mode so I decided to disable it.

Instructions from the Microsoft Knowledge Base page:

To make hibernation unavailable, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then type cmd in the Start Search box.
2. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
3. When you are prompted by User Account Control, click Continue.
4. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe /hibernate off, and then press ENTER.
5. Type exit and then press ENTER to close the Command Prompt window.

To make hibernation available, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then type cmd in the Start Search box.
2. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
3. When you are prompted by User Account Control, click Continue.
4. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe /hibernate on, and then press ENTER.
5. Type exit and then press ENTER to close the Command Prompt window. 

So that pretty much took care of it. My 94GB of free space is now 101GB! Woot! Of course, if I install anything, the system will create a restore point, but whatever, I think I've already installed most everything I need.