She did use (which keeps RAM powered, no disk write), but she never needed full hibernation. That huge file was wasted space. What Meera did She decided to disable hibernation entirely , which would remove hiberfil.sys and free up the space — but keep Sleep mode working.
powercfg /h off Press Enter.
She cleaned temporary files, uninstalled old apps, and even ran Disk Cleanup. Still, almost had quietly vanished.
She had , so Windows reserved roughly 6–8 GB normally — but here it was almost 19 GB . Why? The real issue Hibernation ( hiberfil.sys ) stores everything in RAM to disk so you can shut down and pick up exactly where you left off. But Windows 11 increases that file to up to 40–50% of RAM if Fast Startup (hybrid shutdown) or hibernation is enabled — even if she never used hibernation.
Frustrated, she opened and clicked “Show more categories.” That’s when she saw it: “System & reserved” was huge.
She dug deeper. In , she saw the main drive (C:) and clicked “Properties.” Still not clear.
Within seconds, hiberfil.sys was deleted. Almost free instantly.