If you ever noticed the hiberfil.sys file in the root of your Windows system drive and wondered what it was and how to get rid of it, well here’s your answer!
The hiberfil.sys file is used with the Windows Hibernate feature, and even if you modify your power plan and disable the hibernation features in there, the file will still be on your system. The file size depends on the amount of RAM your system has, as it is used to dump some (or almost all) of the data in RAM on to your hard drive so it can enter a hibernation state. For my system, since I have 4GB of RAM, the file was almost 4GB in size so it made sense to get rid of it if I wasn’t going to use Hibernation mode.
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I’ve been using Windows 7 Ultimate for just a few days, yet I’m already miffed by a few glaringly obvious oversights in the design of some of the most often seen parts of the GUI; the Start Menu.
As you can see in this screenshot, there are two particular areas which I consider design oversights when they were apparently overhauling the GUI to make it look nicer. First is the appearance of the “menu” displayed when I expand “Computer” (it would be the same for any folder – I just have the others set to act as links, not menus). It appears as though they decided to use a generic Windows “context menu” container to display the file list, however you would figure that for the nice and fancy new Start Menu that they could have put a bit more “love” in there and made it look more integrated (such as you’ll get if you were to expand one of the items in the Start Menu list such as “Sticky Notes” or “Windows Virtual PC” in this particular screenshot). I think it would have made it look much nicer, complete, and more thought out.
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If you’ve used the new Windows XP Mode feature of Windows 7, you’re aware that it allows you to save your login credentials for the XPMUser account it creates for you. However, what they failed to inform you of is that these credentials, although saved, are ultimately tied in with the computer name set up for that specific virtual machine.
That may be all well and good (and I do agree, it certainly makes sense), but what if you change the computer name within your XP Mode virtual machine? Well, the answer to that was made abundantly clear to me when I did that very thing (completely unaware of how credentials were saved at the time) just the other day – ultimately locking myself out of accessing any of the applications I had just finished installing in Windows XP Mode.
What happened was somewhat obvious once you look at the information saved in the Credential Manager for a little while; Microsoft Virtual PC was no longer logging me in automatically as the XPMUser – instead it was prompting me to enter the password, or specify an alternate account to log in as. The problem was, I had used a random password generator for the password and never bothered to write it down anywhere (because I figured that the Credential Manager was going to handle that all for me), so I had no idea what the password was and of course the Administrator account is disabled (unless you’re in Safe Mode) so I had no way of logging in any more!
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