Hibernation in Windows 2008 - turn it off!

Unless you want to run Windows 2008 on a laptop, I cannot see why Microsoft in their wisdom would enable hibernation on a server operating system — by default! As this creates a file named c:\hiberfil.sys which is the same size as the memory in the server this is a huge inconvenience, especially running in a virtual environment where you want to keep your disk partitions small.

You can, of course, turn the hibernation off and delete the file by using the following command from the command line:

powercfg -h off

Note: several times I have got the following error message at the command line, despite being a domain admin:

You do not have permission to enable or disable the Hibernate feature.

If this happens, create a shortcut to 'powercfg.exe -h off' and then right-click it and choose 'Run as administrator. This will elevate your priveleges and enable the file to be deleted.

Microsoft: nul points.