Is it Safe to Delete HIBERFIL.SYS and PAGEFILE.SYS?

HIBERFIL.SYS is a file the system creates when the computer goes into hibernation mode. Hibernation takes everything in memory and writes it to your hard drive as the hiberfil.sys file. If you have 512MB of memory, then hiberfil.sys will be about 512MB. If you have 1GB, the file will be around 1GB. Even if you don’t use hibernation, hiberfil.sys will still take up this huge amount of disk space.
I have 2GB of ram in my laptop, that’s why my hiberfil.sys file is 1.99GB in size! Hibernation is enabled by default in Windows XP/Vista and since I don’t use hibernation at all, I might as well turn it off to get back my 2GB hard drive space and store something else.

In Vista:

• Open Control Panel and type in “Hibernate” in the Search.
• Click “Turn hibernation on or off”
• Click “Change advance power settings”
• Scroll to and expand the “Sleep” option.
• Select “Off” to the “Allow hybrid sleep” option.
• Scroll to and expand the “Power buttons and lid” option.
• Select “Hibernate” for the “Sleep button action” option. 10. Select “Hibernate” for the “Start menu power button” option.

Then the hiberfil.sys would be deleted.

Here’s how to turn off Virtual Memory.
Go to Control Panel and run System.
Click on Advanced tab and click the Settings button on Performance.

Click on Advanced tab again and click on the Change button.
Select “No paging file” and click the Set button if you want to remove pagefile.sys.

I wouldn’t recommend you to turn off your virtual memory unless you have lots of RAM. Virtual memory is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM. So if you have very low RAM, maybe 256MB, turning virtual memory off will be a disaster. You will notice that your computer will struggle to multitask. As for my case, I have 2GB of physical ram and disabling paging file didn’t make any difference.