How can I free up space on my laptop hard drive?

Disabling hibernation is a highly effective, built‑in Windows trick that can instantly free up hard drive space on my laptop, often by several gigabytes, without deleting any of your personal files. It does this by removing the hidden system file hiberfil.sys, which Windows uses to save everything in memory when you put your laptop into hibernation.

When you hibernate your laptop (not sleep), Windows takes everything currently in your RAM (open apps, documents, etc.) and writes it to a file named hiberfil.sys on your system drive. Then it completely powers off. When you turn the laptop back on, it reads that file back into RAM, and you pick up exactly where you left off.

The trade‑off is that hiberfil.sys is roughly the size of your installed RAM.

• Example: If you have 8 GB of RAM, hiberfil.sys will be about 6–8 GB.
• With 16 GB of RAM, it can be 12–16 GB.

How to Disable Hibernation:

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator:

Press Windows + R, type cmd, then press Ctrl + Shift + Enter (or right‑click the Start button and select Terminal (Admin)).

2. In the black Command Prompt window, type exactly the following and press Enter:

cmd

powercfg -h off

3. You won’t see a confirmation message, but the hiberfil.sys file will be deleted at once, and hibernation will be disabled.

4. Close the Command Prompt window.

That’s it – you’ve immediately free up hard drive space on my laptop.