Rise available space on your harddrive

Besides cleaning your computer, there are two more procedures (excluding upgrading the drive) which can rise the amount of available space on your harddrive. Besides getting more space, you should get also a little boost for the system. Again, you are using these tips on your own risk!

Changing the size of virtual memory

Simply said, Windows uses virtual memory to rise the size of your RAM. Surely the only memory device it can use for this purpose is harddrive and it creates pagefile.sys on system (or other) drive partition. By default Windows manages the size of virtual memory on its own. That, however, is not particularly effective, as Windows is actually resizing pagefile.sys as needed, resulting in slowing down of your computer. The best way of assuring good performance of your computer is managing the size and placement of virtual memory file by yourself. That said you need to set up the constant size and also place pagefile.sys, or part of it, to different physical harddrive if possible.

Note: Never place pagefile.sys just to different partition of the same harddrive. It will slow down your computer even more! So if you have just one physical harddrive, leave pagefile.sys on drive C:.

How big should pagefile.sys be? Well, I stick to rule, if you have large RAM memory – 3GB and more – you can keep the virtual memory low (some say you can disable it but I wouldn’t recommend that) – I’ve set it up to 256MB.

For other RAM sizes I’d say less physical memory, more virtual memory (and vice versa), but up to about 1.5 times of physical RAM size should be enough even for 0.5GB RAM.

Procedure on how to set up the virtual memory size (should work for Windows XP, Vista and 7):

1. Click Start button (or Windows orb).
2. Right click on Computer / My Computer, choose Properties from menu.
3. Just for Windows Vista and 7: Click Advanced system settings on the left side of the System window.
4. Click the [Settings] button in the Performance section of the Advanced tab. 
5. Select Advanced tab in the Performance Options window.
6. Click the [Change] button in the Virtual memory section. 
7. Highlight the drive letter where you want to place pagefile.sys (usually drive C:), select Custom Size and set the same amounts (in MB) for Initial size and Maximum size.
8. Press [Set] button to apply changes and then confirm pressing [OK] button 3 times. 
9. After restarting your computer, the new size (and placement) of pagefile.sys will be applied.

Turning off hibernation

What is hibernation and why would you bother turning it off? Windows operating system offers 2 ways of putting your computer into sleep:  

Standard Sleep mode
When you put your computer into standard Sleep mode, it still requires a little amount of power. This is because content of RAM memory needs to be preserved in RAM itself, and as it is volatile type of storage, it requires constant power to retain the information. Therefor I’d suggest to use Sleep mode just for relatively short amount of time (several of hours or so).

Hibernation
On the other hand if you use hibernation mode, you basically turn the computer off with no power being consumed, and when waking the system up from hibernation, it starts much faster than during normal power up (actually faster start up time applies also for Sleep mode). The difference between hibernation and sleep mode is that hibernation stores all content of RAM memory to your harddrive, thus creating file hibernate.sys of computer’s RAM size. Yes, if you have 3GB of RAM you will actually “loose” those 3GB from Windows’ system drive (usually C:)…

I have never used hibernation and don’t know anybody who uses it, that’s why I recommend to disabling it (but it’s completely up to you!). You will save some more GB of your harddrive.

To disable hibernation follow these steps (works for Windows XP, Vista and 7):

1. Click Start button (or Windows orb).
2. Go to All Programs → Accessories.
3. Right click on Command Prompt and choose to Run as administrator (for Windows XP just left click on Command Prompt).
4. Command Prompt window will appear, so type in “powercfg -h off” (without quotation marks) and press [Enter]. 
5. You are done. No status message is displayed in this case, so just close Command Prompt window and after next restart of your computer you will be surprised about more space available on your system drive.

Note: If you need to enable hibernation again, proceed as before, but type in “powercfg -h on” command instead and restart your computer.

Hope these procedures, along with tools I’ve mentioned in my previous article, helps you to squeeze more from your Windows.

Oliver Juhás 07.12.2009, 16:19 Computers Tutorials harddrive hibernation optimization paging file sleep mode speed up Windows virtual memory