How to free gigabytes of HD space you didn't know you had
There are many ways to clean out unwanted files on you hard drive to free up space. One of the biggest memory hogs in Windows 7/8 that most people don't know about is the system hibernation function.
The system hibernation function is turned on by default when you install windows. This power option allows you to "hibernate" your computer so that when you unhibernate it, everything you were working on is saved and retrieved very quickly. The problem with the windows hibernate function is it can use up a huge portion of your HDD/SSD space. SSD's are without a doubt the most affected. Since the most common SSD sizes sold are 64-256gb, hibernate can take up a large portion of your disk space. Hibernate takes up disk space based on how much RAM you have. So for instance, I have 16gb of RAM installed on my laptop and windows hibernate reserves 75% of my RAM as disk space. That means if I have hibernate enabled, windows will reserve 12GB from my SSD for hibernate. That means that 10% of my SSD is reserved by hibernate and is unusable space. Luckily we can disable hibernate and free up this space if we don't use hibernate.
There are many different methods, I will cover a few of them here.
Method 1
1. Open an elevated command prompt. (An elevated command prompt is just a command prompt run as an administrator)
2. Type "powercfg -h off" without the quotes.
3. Press enter
Method 2
1. Go to your power options in control panel.
2. Open the advanced power plan settings for the power plan currently being utilized by your computer.
3. Expand the "Sleep" option.
4. Under "hibernate after" set the time to "Never".
5. Under "Allow Hybrid Sleep" set the setting to "off".
That is it. This shouldn't require a restart and you should be able to see the new disk space that has been freed in your drive. This is especially useful for people who use SSD's and also have a good amount of RAM.
