Hibernation has got to be one of the good things that Windows offers for mobile computing. But if you don’t have a real use for it, then why not just turn it off. While there are some good things about it – not losing what you’re doing when you need to shut your computer down – there are some kinks to it that I don’t like to deal with. Like the hibernation file taking as much space as you have physical RAM. And I have 2GBs of RAM and only 120GBs of hard drive space and I’ve actually used a great deal of that. Another 2GBs of data just to store a current session isn’t too attractive at all.

With Vista, there are two ways to disable hibernation. Pick your poison.

Via Disk Cleanup

• Click Start and type disk cleanup and hit Enter
• Select All files from this computer (be sure to have administrator privileges here as User Account control will bug you)
• Select the drive where Vista is installed
• Wait for Vista to finish scanning the files
• Check the Hibernation File Cleaner option then click OK (just take note of the other options that are checked)
• If prompted to delete files, click the Delete Files button

Via Command Prompt

Now I clearly don’t get it why disabling Hibernation doesn’t appear in the Power Options but you can do a manual override via command prompt.

• Click Start then type command prompt, right-click on the icon and select “Run as Administrator”
• Acknowledge the UAC prompt
• In the command prompt window, type powercfg –h off
• Close the command prompt window