Should Windows 8 be taking up 40GB of my HDD when my drive is compressed?

I want to install a game that requires 12GB on my computer with an HDD that shows 53GB total capacity, so I cleared everything off of it.

• All documents, pictures, downloads, desktop, etc empty


• Drive is compressed to save space


• Ran Disk Cleanup and removed every option there, gaining about 1GB of space


• Uninstalled all non-essential programs, all games, even my antivirus.

But I'm still 3GB short.

It appears that the Windows 8 OS is taking up 40GB by itself. I looked it up on Google and supposedly Windows 8 is only supposed to require half of that.

Can/Should Windows 8 really be taking up this much space even with my drive compressed, and is there any way to reduce it?

Answer

You may find that HIBERFIL.SYS (a hidden system file) is taking up a lot of space on your main (internal) hard drive.

If you want to reclaim this space at the cost of not being able to hibernate your PC any more you can follow these instructions:

How to disable hibernation

Alternatively you can run the following from a Command Prompt which is running in Administrator Mode and this will achieve the same effect:

powercfg -h off