Free up space for SSD -Disable Hibernation & Pagefile?

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thenightman4u

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Well I'm a proud owner on a 12GB SSD and I'm trying to figure out ways to free up unwanted or unneeded Windows 7 stuff. I don't use Hibernation so I disabled it and it gave me 6GB more free space on the SSD. I'm curious to if it's ok to disable Pagefile(Virtual Memory). It's showing me using/allowing up to 8GB. I have disabled it and it did free up that amount on my SSD but is it harmful to do this? I have 8GB on physical memory installed, it would seem as though I have enough for my programs. A clean boot shows me only using 12% of my 8GB. What are your thoughts on this?
 
the only possible issue you might run into is that a program tries to allocate memory, but can't. any remotely decent program will handle that error properly with a error box or something innocuous. I would say there is no danger to turning it off, it just might (although probably wont) be inconvenient depending on how many apps you leave open.
 
Even if you turn the pagefile off, you will still find that Windoz will have a pagefile on your system drive. It will automagically make as much virtual memory as it thinks it needs.

Did you say 12 GB SSD? Spend the 50 bux and at least get a 30 gig drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227460

#Edit# Just razing him.

Windows 7 system requirements
If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Additional requirements to use certain features:
Click to expand...
 
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I did mean 120GB. Why does windows still create space for virtual memory even if I disable it? I don't see why it would think I need it when I have 8GB physically installed.
 
I don't know why. Windoz is just like that sometimes.

You know what, now that I think about it that might have been a Windows XP thing. I have been running SSD's with Windows 7, so I don't think I have ever tried turning the pagefiles off since I have been running 7.

I am on the road with an XP only laptop right now, but I will have to check this out when I get home.

Don
 
I disabled Virtual memory but in the system info it still says it set aside 7.97GB. I don't know why. It says no pagefile though
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windows always does craptomatic stuff like this...or installing a complete secret image of itself on your RAID without asking
 
I have been researching how to completely disable virtual memory but I haven't found a way. It's kinda stupid since it shows being disabled but still using it...
 
Go to folder options and turn on where you can view system files.

Then go to the root of your boot drive c usually, and see if you still have a pagefile.sys file and how big is it.

I believe you may still see something there even if you have disabled virtual memory. I can't check it as I am not in front of a Win 7 system for another couple of days.

Don
 
Here's a simpler way - open a command prompt, type "dir c:\ /ah /as" (or another drive letter if you moved it). The file list will show pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys if they exist.
 
If you disable the page file it will stay there until you restart, and disappear once rebooted. My opinion, if you have plenty of RAM, disable the page file. It's pointless. Any program that somehow can detect what is going on with memory is a flawed one. Any program that instantly pre-allocates an assumed amount of huge space of memory is a flawed one. It's a position I stand for very strongly and I will fight to the death over it, even if it means my own life is taken. You can't disable virtual memory. Virtual memory is the name of Windows' memory management. The only problem you will ever run into is if your computer does a chkdsk it will allocate every byte it scans to RAM and then crash once it runs out. Microsoft insists this is done by design, but I can't see how it would even work with a page file.
 
You can reduce the size of the page file (and allow it to grow if needed), so why risk disabling it completely? Best case, you set a small 1GB page file and everything works fine with you losing 1GB of SSD space. Worst case, you disable the page file and some obscure program you use freaks out and crashes. Why risk it over 500mb or 1GB of SSD space?
 
There is no "risk". A program has no business managing memory. Period. There are alternatives for everything.
 
I disabled Hibernation,Pagefile and System Restore right after a clean install. I installed all my program I normally use which is around 7-8 of them without any issues either installing them or using them. I'm enjoying 15GB of more space! I also did these too.

1- Disabled disk defrag
2- Disabled Indexing
3- Moved Firefox cache from HDD to RAM
 
grimster said:
There is no "risk". A program has no business managing memory. Period. There are alternatives for everything.
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It might not have any business doing it, but that doesn't stop them from doing it anyway. Seriously, what's the benefit from completely disabling the pagefile? A marginal amount of hard drive space, and that's all. Even if there is no risk, what's the point of trying to second-guess the engineers that designed the operating system? If it works, why mess with it?
 
Forceman said:
It might not have any business doing it, but that doesn't stop them from doing it anyway. Seriously, what's the benefit from completely disabling the pagefile? A marginal amount of hard drive space, and that's all. Even if there is no risk, what's the point of trying to second-guess the engineers that designed the operating system? If it works, why mess with it?
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If the engineers didn't want it to be ever disabled, and didn't design the OS to know how to act with it disabled, they wouldn't give an option to disable it. A very flimsy argument...

thenightman4u said:
I will run it like this for now and if I ever come across a issue I can always add pagefile.
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Finally a voice of reason. One doesn't need an SSD to constantly be fucked with to shorten its life. If a page file is absolutely necessary for some stupid reason, it can be temporarily enabled.
 
grimster said:
If the engineers didn't want it to be ever disabled, and didn't design the OS to know how to act with it disabled, they wouldn't give an option to disable it. A very flimsy argument...
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So your better, non-flimsy, argument is that you should just because you can? Yes, I can see how that makes much more sense.

grimster said:
Finally a voice of reason. One doesn't need an SSD to constantly be fucked with to shorten its life. If a page file is absolutely necessary for some stupid reason, it can be temporarily enabled.
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See, and then you bring up the completely debunked SSD lifespan issue as some kind of justification. Seriously, 20GB a day for 5 years, at least, for an Intel SSD - and that's your justification for disabling the pagefile that Microsoft themselves says should be left on the SSD?

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

•Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
•Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
•Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
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http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Bottom line, OP, it's your system so you can set it up any way you want, but Win 7 is not Win XP, and doesn't need to be endlessly tweaked to get the best performance.
 
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SSDs have been around to the general public for what, 2-3 years? So yeah plenty of testing to confirm these overblown numbers. We all know nothing is perfect, and to use math to assume a lifetime of something based on a large group of shorter term testing is just bad and stupid science. 5 years for the top-of-the-line Intel SSD is pathetic.

Get over it. The page file is COMPLETELY useless in these days when you can now run more than 4 GB of RAM, and it is dirt fuckin' cheap to buy a very healthy amount of it. It was created when RAM was going for insane prices, they couldn't implement a lot of it, and they saw a disk could be used to dump some less-urgent crap onto.

Any program that demands a shit ton of RAM will be some professional thing, and programs costing thousands of dollars should have smart enough programmers behind it to not fuck with managing system memory, and should create its own swap file.
 
This has gotten off-topic. I was just wanting to free up space on my SSD. The debate now is if leaving it on degrades the life of an SSD. I have been using my programs and several games like Black Ops, Battlefield 3 and Hard Reset without any issues. It's not hard to enable Pagefile in the future if a problem occurs from it being disabled. My whole thing is I just bought 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR3 2133 and I would imaging it should be enough to be able to disable Pagefile. I seriously doubt I will use up all my memory, I reboot often so I always refresh it, even the most demanding games don't use up 8GB
 
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thenightman4u said:
It's not hard to enable Pagefile in the future if a problem occurs from it being disabled.
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The only problem with that plan is that you might not know the reason for the crash is because the page file is disabled, and so you might spend lots of time and effort troubleshooting something unrelated. It's not like there is any performance benefit to disabling (or enabling) it, so you are basically just trading some small amount of SSD space against the potential for trouble down the line. If that trade-off is worth it for you, that's fine. We just want to help you make an informed decision. Again, your machine, so your choice.
 
thenightman4u said:
I disabled Virtual memory but in the system info it still says it set aside 7.97GB. I don't know why. It says no pagefile though
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Don't confuse "virtual memory" and "the pagefile". They are not the same thing.

You didn't disable 'virtual memory'. You disabled the pagefile.

There are several types of "virtual memory" used in Windows. For example, when you load an executable file it is actually not immediately loaded. Instead, the file is added to the virtual memory map - the pages of the executable file are "mapped" as virtual memory and when the first time each page is needed they are "swapped in" directly from the filesystem.

Data files are managed the same way - at least until you write to them, at which time they are mapped a bit differently, but still mapped.

The "pagefile" is used to swap out "dirty" pages - pages that have been written to by a program and can no longer be mapped to an existing executable or file in the filesystem.

These are oversimplified descriptions, but reasonably accurate. In the example above, there are, indeed, 7.97 GB used and 6.03 GB available, which exceeds the physical memory, but the pagefile is still 0 GB. This means that the 'virtual' memory is based on mapping to other places. The pagefile itself is zero'd out and there is no allocation taking up space for pagefile.

Clear as mud, right?
 
Certainly. I'm also full of looking to the future and not staying stuck in the past, within reason.
 
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