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.

To get rid of the hiberfil.sys file, open up an elevated (as in, Administrator) command prompt and simply type in:

powercfg -h off

This will turn off the Windows Hibernate features (including disabling them in your Power Options) and with it, delete the hiberfil.sys file from your system so you can reclaim some space (and it also helps with defragmentation of your drive, as it is a system file that cannot be moved; the same thing goes for pagefile.sys, which you can read about in my other article “Give Windows a Swap partition with no drive letter“).

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.

The second pin in my rear is the redesigned Shutdown button and it’s corresponding context menu. It’s just plain horrid! Why couldn’t they have made it look the same as the other items above it like the “Computer” item for example? Or, heck, bring back the much more pleasant-looking Vista Shutdown buttons – those were well designed and I think more intuitive at quick glance; simple red power-symbol button, or having to read “Shutdown” in an ugly, oddly-sized button – what’s your pick?

Perhaps I will spend a few minutes and try to mock-up what I think would look nicer, though honestly I doubt anyone from the Microsoft Windows GUI team will ever come across this post, let alone this site

For the longest time ever, I always wished that you could do more than just move your Windows swap file (pagefile.sys) to another drive letter. First of all, having to assign a drive letter to the partition you want purely for storing the Windows page file really sucks because then that means the drive letter shows up in explorer (sure, you can hide drive letters, but you’ve still wasted a drive letter on the partition). Second of all, if you think you’re being smart by creating a partition at the root of your drive during Windows installation, chances are you kicked yourself after going through the install only to realize that it assigned that partition the letter “C:” and now Windows is installed on “D:” (good luck getting out of that scenario – I’d recommend just redoing the install entirely; trust me it saves you a ton of headaches).

Well, since I just got my fancy copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, I figured I would see what I could do finally about this situation. Upon booting up the Windows 7 DVD, I went through the installer up to picking the partition I wanted to install Windows 7 on to. I clicked the Advanced button so I could delete all my existing partitions and set the drive up the way I wanted. With an entirely blank drive, I began by creating a single partition on the drive (entire drive). This let the installer create the special “System Reserved” partition that it wanted. I then selected the other partition it made and deleted that and then created a new partition the size I wanted for my swap. I have 4GB of ram on this system so I want at least double that, plus I may want extra space for something else eventually so I went for a 16GB partition. Next, I created the last partition with the rest of the drive space; this is my Windows partition (C: drive). I selected the Windows partition and clicked Format (do *not* do this for the Swap partition yet!).

The next step was where some of the nerd-magic came in. I backed out of the installer at this point and got back to the main window and clicked on the Recovery link near the bottom. From there I selected the top radio button and then on the next screen I selected the Recovery Console. Once in the console I ran “diskpart” to let me tinker with the partitions I had just created. Using diskpart isn’t too complicated. You can type in “help” to get a list of the commands you can use; it’s not overly complex if you come from a Linux background and you’re used to using fdisk. I selected the Swap partition (volume) I had made earlier and ran “ATTRIBUTES VOLUME SET NODEFAULTDRIVELETTER”. This prevents the system from automatically assigning drive letters to any partitions on this drive – it will still assign “C:”, however the Swap partition will not get a letter. Once that was done, I made sure to list out the volumes just to be sure it didn’t already have a drive letter (it shouldn’t since we didn’t format it yet). I then closed the console, and closed the window with the recovery choices (this brings you back to the start – you don’t have to click Shutdown or Restart!). I then went back through the installation process, selected my Windows partition I had created and let it install Windows 7 to the drive.

After finishing the Windows install and logging in, I thought about how I would actually go about using that Swap partition for the page file without giving it a drive letter. I decided to search the registry for “pagefile.sys” to see what I could come up with and I found that the only real occurrence of it is in “HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\”. There are two keys in there, PagingFiles and ExistingPageFiles, which reference pagefile.sys and that’s about it. Obviously ExistingPageFiles is not a key we want to modify, however PagingFiles is.

So here’s where the real brains came in to help… I went in to Disk Management and selected the unformatted Swap partition I had created and formatted it as NTFS (with 32k blocks – we don’t need small blocks here… the bigger the better for performance). Then, I opened up Explorer and decided I would have this partition mounted to “C:\Windows\Pagefile” – yup, I’m mounting it to a path, not a drive letter! So, I created the directory and then went in to it’s security permissions. I removed all the inherited permissions and set the following permissions on it: TrustedInstaller (“NT Service\TrustedInstaller” is the account name you must type in to make that work) got full access, SYSTEM got full access and Administrators got Read & Execute access. I then went and changed the Owner to TrustedInstaller as well. Once you do this, you won’t be able to access the folder even as an Administrator – but that’s what we want since we don’t want anything having any access to pagefile.sys except the system itself.

I then went back in to Disk Management and again selected the Swap partition and went in to “Change Drive Letter and Paths…”, clicked Add… and set it to mount to the “C:\Windows\Pagefile” folder I had created. I made sure to confirm that the process had worked successfully (basically just went back in to make sure it was listed in the “Change Drive Letter and Paths…” dialog box). Now that I had my Swap partition mounted to the directory, I just had to change where pagefile.sys would be written (and erase the old pagefile.sys file). I opened up regedit, went to “HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\” and double clicked the PagingFiles key to modify it. This registry entry allows for multiple pagefiles to be specified, one per line. The 3 different formats it can have are rather simple to understand after having examined it in different configurations.

• The first mode is having Windows manage pagefile.sys for you; the drive letter is specified with “?” to denote that it is whatever drive letter Windows is installed on and then the full path to pagefile.sys is specified (eg “?:\Windows\Pagefile\pagefile.sys”).
• The second mode is managing the location of pagefile.sys yourself, but having Windows manage it’s size; the full path to pagefile.sys is now specified including the drive letter, and then we add two zeros separated by spaces to denote a dynamic minimum and maximum size for pagefile.sys growth (eg “C:\Windows\Pagefile\pagefile.sys 0 0″).
• The third mode is managing pagefile.sys entirely on our own; The full path to pagefile.sys is specified, and then we specify an absolute minimum and maximum size for the file in MB (eg “C:\Windows\Pagefile\pagefile.sys 6144 10240″).

I chose the third method since after some experimenting it appears as though this is the most compatible with the Virtual Memory settings in Windows. Using the first method, Windows doesn’t appear to know where pagefile.sys is or that it is supposed to be managing it for us. Using the third method, it knows that pagefile.sys is indeed located on our “C:” drive and that there are explicit minimum and maximum growth limits specified. It may be only visual, but I didn’t want to chance it with my virtual memory (since running in to the problem when I would need my virtual memory would be a very bad thing).

Finally, to make sure the existing pagefile.sys was deleted (properly), I opened up “Local Security Policy” from the “Administrative Tools” control panel. I navigated to “Local Policies\Security Options” and scrolled down near the bottom of the list to find “Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile” and simply enabled the option. This would take care of deleting the page file at shutdown for me.

That was about it – next was taking a leap of faith and hoping that when I rebooted, everything would still work! So, I crossed my fingers and hit restart and watched as my hard drive light went nuts as it deleted the current pagefile.sys before rebooting. Once my system came back up I went in to Disk Management, right clicked the Swap partition and clicked Properties. I checked to make sure there was some space being used up just to confirm that pagefile.sys was now being stored there instead of my Windows partition – and it was! All I had left to do was go back in to “Local Security Policy” and disable the “Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile” setting.

I had finally done it – I had created a separate partition for Windows to store its page file without having to resort to assigning a drive letter. So far, the only drawback seems to be that if you go in to your system settings to manage your Virtual Memory, it gets a bit confused and indicates that there is no paging file set on your “C:” drive – which I suppose is now technically correct… but I wonder what might happen if Windows tries to allocate more space than is available in the Swap partition for Virtual Memory… I think I may have to peek at some more registry entries to see if I can set the min/max values for Virtual Memory so that can’t happen.

If you’re also wondering about how to deal with the hiberfil.sys file in the root of your Windows drive, you can read up on that in my other post “Delete hiberfil.sys from the root of your Windows drive“.

For the longest time I refused to use the WIDCOMM drivers because their look and feel was stuck in the Windows XP days – it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t integrate nicely in with Vista and it completely took over the Bluetooth stack which I didn’t want to do because I was afraid it would prevent my Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 (Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo) from working.

Well, the other day I decided to replace my old Plantronics Explorer 320 headset (Bluetooth 1.2) with a new Sony Playstation 3 Bluetooth headset (cheap, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR). I went and paired up the new headset with Vista, however the sound was just as choppy as before and it really didn’t seem to be any better; those old Bluetooth Audio drivers I hacked in to Vista needed updating…

I did a ton of searching and came across most of the same articles I found when I was first looking for drivers to add in A2DP/HFP/HSP Bluetooth profiles to the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. I tried grabbing newer drivers for the Dell Notebook Bluetooth drivers, but those didn’t work at all. I went searching for more drivers but they all seemed to be based on the same drivers (ironically all made by Broadcom). As a last ditch effort, I went to Broadcom’s website and grabbed their latest driver download just to see if maybe I could extract the driver files and manually update my drivers without installing the whole thing.

As it turns out however, the new Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers aren’t a complete overwrite of the Windows Vista drivers – they appear to finally just throw in all the extra Bluetooth profile drivers that are missing from Microsoft’s Bluetooth stack. I was quite surprised, as I thought I was hosing my system when I ran the installer to try and just extract the files; the Bluetooth control panel and other areas of Vista all appear just as they did before but with extra features now available!

I paired the new headset with my system and watched as the new drivers kicked in and made everything work perfectly. Rather than being stuck with low-quality mono in/out from my headset, I now get to enjoy stereo sound and recording which makes a ton of difference in the audio quality from a Bluetooth headset.

So, if you’re looking to get your Bluetooth device working with Windows Vista or Windows 7 and it just won’t work – chances are you’re missing the required Bluetooth profile drivers and you should seriously consider installing the latest Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers which will update the existing Microsoft Bluetooth stack on your system.

I first noticed the problem after having taken my network apart because I got a new Rogers VOIP cable box (Rogers Home Phone service) added, and I opted to hook it up myself so I could do a nice wiring job. I got that done and hooked everything back up just the way it was – powered on my firewall/server box, cable modem and router all hooked up just they were before. Things seemed normal until I tried to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and my browser stalled half way trying to load it up – refreshes wouldn’t help much, sometimes it would get a bit further, but it never got to loading the ActiveX part of it. Other sites were working fine though which was really confusing.

I thought maybe Windows XP was pwned or something, so I tried Vista – it worked which led me to think XP was in trouble – so I spent countless hours searching for anything – something – that I thought might be the cause. I tried fixing *everything* from network stacks, registry, hardware, drivers, WSH reinstall – you name it. Nothing worked. Then I noticed file transfers were very slow for uploads through XP and Vista, so I got to tinkering with stuff to figure that out.

Eventually I came to messing with cables and I thought maybe my wireless router was to blame. I reset it to factory defaults and set it up again, but it made no difference. So then I tried tinkering with how my network was routed. My network was set up as such: Internet -> cable modem -> linux firewall box -> router -> workstations. That configuration used to be working fine until now. After running various different setups, the following setups work fine: Internet -> cable modem -> workstation; Internet -> cable modem ->router -> workstations; Internet -> cable modem -> router -> linux firewall box -> workstation.

That final configuration is what really has me boggled – if the router itself works, and the workstation to the server to the router works, why doesn’t the workstation to the router to the server work? I thought maybe it was some upgrade I had done to the box (which is running Gentoo), so I rebuilt every program on the system, recompiled the kernel, made sure iptables (which does masquerading from one nic out the other to the cable modem normally) was set up right and even tried upgrading and downgrading iptables versions – all met with no change in the problem. I even checked stuff like IPv4 forwarding, made sure ECN was disabled and not compiled in the kernel – I honestly don’t know what else it could be. Yes, I *even* made new cables just in case the other ones I had started to fray a bit in the ends.

So, I’m sitting here now, using my wireless router to handle the cable modem DHCP and my linux server just hanging off the router along with the workstations – not the setup I want, but at least sites are working. I just hope someone reads this and has a clue as to what the hell might be going on to cause this problem! It’s driving me f-ing nuts and I want it figured out so I can fix it!

*UPDATE*

After having just given up on the problem after a week or so of messing around, I finally went and baselined the server to get a fresh Gentoo install on it since it really did need one, and I kinda hoped that it would fix the problem as well. Unfortunately it didn’t – it was just as bad as before… however this gave me the final piece of the puzzle to really nail down what the hell was going on (oh, and I had baselined my workstation too with a fresh install of Vista Ultimate).

So, I had 2 fresh OS installs, a network cable I knew worked, a router I knew worked… the thing left was the network cards in use. I was pretty sure the one in my workstation was OK since it worked fine without the server in the way. As for the server – when I put it all back the way I wanted, I noticed that I’d experience lag “spikes” on my SSH terminal (to/from traffic out to the net seemed to be on/off as well, and consistently *slow*). The only odd thing was that neither network card on the server was reporting *any* errors.

Outbound to the Internet from the server itself seemed fine, coupled with the local lag spikes I was encountering… I figured perhaps it’s the local network card on the server despite no errors. They were both $10 Realtek NIC’s I bought over 6 years ago and I had one die on me unexpectedly before in my workstation (and then it decided to work again months later when I forgot it was busted and swapped it in to a system). So, since I had onboard with my workstation and Vista had drivers for it, I took out my other NIC from there and removed the local NIC on my server and replaced it with the one from my workstation. Power everything back on, check to make sure things are running right and presto!

So, next on my shopping list are two new $23 (ooh, I’m upgrading in price!) D-Link 530′s to replace those crappy Realtek’s. I’m wondering if I’ll notice an over-all speed increase from swapping them both out too – that’d be a nice little bonus.

*2nd UPDATE*

It’s been a while and things were going OK, however I started noticing that my ISP POP3 account was lagging out horribly whenever I’d check for email, and also uploads were going slow again.  I thought “crap, the damned problem is still there”, which it was – it never really went away.  I went out and got 2 replacement D-Link DGE-530T cards (gigabit nic’s) which also support VLAN and other fancy stuff.  Initially I had just the one card and replaced the outbound NIC hoping it was just that one (this is the one I didn’t replace yet).  It didn’t seem to make any difference.  I then got the other NIC, and swapped it in and even switched power supplies with a beefier one I had laying around from an old system (had to cannibalize a replacement fan for it since I had yanked the one out of the new power supply for a case fan in my desktop).  I figured two new cards and a stable power supply should do the trick… but nope, still didn’t make a difference!

I figured the last thing I could play with were the MTU settings – I had noticed a while back that my outbound card on the server was getting 576 from the cable modem, and my internal LAN had it’s usual 1500.  I thought that Linux would just gracefully handle the additional packet info and split it up accordingly and deal with it for me – I mean after all, this problem wasn’t apparent since I’ve first had the cable modem.  Even so, I figured what the hey – chop off 16 bits (8 for the wireless router, another 8 for the server – just to be sure) and give it a whirl.  So I set my server’s internal connection to have an MTU of 560, and the same for the router’s WAN port which goes to the server.  Give it a shot and what do you know – full upload speed!

So, after *all* this headache, all I had to do was tweak my MTU settings!  I figure that when they came and installed my VOIP home phone service that they changed the cable modem’s MTU setting, either that or just coincidence that on that day, the ISP lowered the MTU setting enough to cause a noticable problem.