Hi all, I have an 80gig SSD, which I have Windows 7 and one big game on. It only has about 17gig free which doesn't leave me room for a second game which I really want. I was thinking about maybe installing Win 7 on a second mechanical disk, and maybe I could just have the swapfile on my SSD? The main reason I got the SSD was because I want general windows use to be snappy, but I also wanted to have a couple of games on too.
You need a larger SSD, I am afraid. Windows 7 (unlike XP) uses your RAM first. So you move your pagefile anywhere... it won't do anything, as it's not "in use". What you can do is get a super fast 1TB 7200RPM HDD like Samsung Spinpoint F3 series, or the Western Digital Caviar Black series, and use that to put your games. It won't be SSD fast, of course not, far from it.. but at least you are using a very fast HDD.
Page file is always in use, all programs are hard coded to use only 2-3GB of RAM, the rest is PF. That why, for me, even stuff not using the SSD is sped up...
Hmm no. The reason page file is "always in use", is because the pagefile is a constant backup of your RAM, so that when there is space in your RAM, but no room without splitting the program in 2 or more (RAM is NEVER fragmented). It does something called Context Switch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_switch). Basically, the process involves at clearing the RAM (so your computer stalls for a moment, as the CPU can ONLY access RAM, not your HDD), and copies the page file to the RAM, so that the program can fit. This process is less and less seen due to the high amount of RAM we put in our computers) If we were using XP, then I would say, yes. Because XP is designed for 128MB of RAM systems it is optimized to use the least amount of memory. You can have 4GB, it will still treat your system as "low memory" and dump everything on the page file it can. This can be simply visible by playing a big game for a while, and quit the game. Notice how the HDD is in super heavy usage, and that the screen is slowly being re-drawn. You all recall this annoyance, which magically isn't there in Windows 7.
How come large programs only use small amounts of RAM then? And when I got a SSD EVERYTHING sped up... Also I notice you don't have a SSD, you you can't really comment...
Thanks guys, shame I may buy another SSD sometime but can't afford it now. I'm disappointed me 80gig got eaten up. Not sure how, I have Win7 on which is about 24gig, and Arma 2 which is about 16. But then a lot of little applications which are taking up another few gig or so, and then about 4gig of savegames and stuff in the users folder... All ate it up pretty quick. Oh well, maybe I'll try to get another 80 and then that would be plenty.
When you compile a program, the the compiler will determine the memory it will allocate on the RAM when you'll execute it. Then when you run the program, depending on how the program is designed to manage things, it can store information/data in either it's heap memory or stack... As this simplified diagram shows: If it needs more memory, then it will scale the program, or unallocated it from memory and relocate it somewhere else in memory, to not fragment anything with even more memory. Windows task Manager, only shows what the program consumes, hence why the memory of a simple program is not fixed. The reason why "everything is fast with an SSD", is the program when it loads stuff externally, the SSD is faster at providing the data upon the request it receives from the running program for it to load into it's memory. Hence why game level, for example, loads so much faster. But, if you look at my programs, which doesn't load anything externally, it doesn't run faster if you have an SSD. Example: the following Flash video (which i made for a different topic), does not run faster on your SSD. http://helpweaver.com/speed/speed.html The slowest part in your computer (beside your optical drive, USB memory key and floppy drive if you have one), is your SSD/HDD. Even the fastest SSD is still a huge bottleneck in providing information to the memory to be loaded and processed by the CPU. This is why you might THINK your computer process stuff faster, but it does not. It can load the data faster that is all. For faster processing you go with a faster CPU (or overclock it). If you like to read more and go more in depth on all this, I suggest the following book: Operating Systems by Gary J. Nutt. It's not the best of books, but it does explain the underground of Operating Systems, and how stuff works.. else than that there is always Wikipedia.
I have 2 80GB SSD's, I use one for OS and normal programs and one for games. The 'OS' drive is 35GB ish, but its good to leave plenty of space free for over provisioning otherwise the drive can slow right down.
Oooohhh! I just found out that I got 11 gig being used by the pagefile and the hibernation files... pagefile.sys hiberfil.sys Apparently you can do away with the pagefile if you have enough ram, and get rid of the hibernate file if you don't hibernate. So that will give me plenty of room for a second game!
Let's see what we can do to help. First, you have Windows Volume Shadow Copy. It's a feature part of Windows 7/Vista which allows you to go back in time on a file, folder, drive and system. This consume some space.. if you don't need this feature you can disable this: 1- Open Computer, click on the bar on top System Properties 2- On the left side column, click on System protection. A panel will open. 3- From there, click on your drive, and click on Delete button 4- Now click on Configure button, and select Turn off system protection You need to restart your computer to set the changes. Another thing we can do, is go in Firefox, and go to the Options panel. Under Privacy section, click on the blue link to clear your recent History. A panel will appear. On it, select Everything, and check everything on the list that will appear, except: Cookies, Site preferences, and Active Logins. Now go under Advanced section, and go under the Network tab. From there set a limit to your cache, like 200MB. As for Internet Explorer, even if you don't use it, go in the option, and clear the cache as well. Now, download and install CCleaner (free), run it. This program is designed to clean almost everything that is left by popular programs for cache or temp. Make sure the following check boxes are checked: - Windows Error Reporting - Windows log files - Memory dumps - Old prefetch data - User Assist History - IIS Log File - and every check box under the "Applications" tab You may want to uncheck Cookies for your web browser. Click on Analyze and once done, click on Run Cleaner Another thing you can do, is go to C:\Users\<YOUR ACCOUNT NAME>\AppData\Local\Temp. Note: AppData is a hidden folder. Inside it, select all files and folder, and delete them (you may have some file that can't be deleted, don't worry about them). Information: AppData is a folder which programs create and uses to store program settings, or data which is needs. For example, a music player program can stores music album artwork inside in, for faster showing (won't need to get the artwork on the web again). If you have programs which you uninstalled, usually (and it's wrong, and I don't do that for my software), programs leaves behind it's crap. So you can start deleting those. At worst, if you delete a folder by mistake (and empty the recycle bin), the program assumes you are running it for the first time, so you could lose all it's settings. Also check out your instant messaging program, some of them keeps received files in there... so might want to delete those. You can also turn off Hibernation. Hibernation file is the size of your RAM, as when you go into hibernation, the RAM is copied there, ready to be restored when you turn back on Windows. Empty your recycle bin. You should have a lot more space now. Removing PageFile will also free up space, but only do it if: -> You have 4GB of RAM or more -> You don't leave your computer 24/7 on (or at sleep), where you actually restart or shut-down your computer at least once a week. (else you MAY get (depending on your usage) "Low in virtual memory" messages, as the Context switch procedure mentioned on my previous post, can't occur. Or that you don't have enough RAM and it want to use the page file which doesn't exists.
Doing all that will help though, as 20%ish of a SSD should be left for OP, I formatted mine to only use 65GB, so I'd say 60GB is the max, so every little bit you can squeeze out will help...
You have done things like disable hibernation & delete the hiberfil.sys file (unless you actually need to use hibernation that is)? - (having disabled it in the power settings), in an administrator command prompt type "powercfg –h off" (without the quotes)... ...& then reboot. Then, whilst the quantity of ram you have will affect your settings, you can limit the pagefile use somewhat by setting a range (unlike a HDD there's no advantage to having a fixed size one)... ...so, for example, on this machine (internet, some of Office, a bit of functional audio processing, etc), with 8GB of ram then i've set it to a range of 400-4000MB so unless it actually needs more than 400MB then it won't use it (though Windows can choose to use more than the maximum if it runs out). Otherwise it's about prioritising things - well having the OS & (esp the frequently accessed) programs on the SSD is a very good idea but, for myself at least, having ~6GB of old emails & ~36GB of stuff on the desktop (rolling temp storage before organising/putting online/etc) on the SSD would be a bit pointless as they're low priority, so i move both of them to a HDD. Yeah, okay, i've got more space than you & 'could' put them on the SSD but it's choice - it means there's less data to be moved about for wear levelling/increased OP -> better maintainance of speeds/increased longevity/etc. So it 'may' be the case that you've got loads of random crap on there which would be better suited to being moved to a HDD - giving you more space for the good stuff. Yeah, having looked at those, you really do want to be keeping ~25% free space on a SSD so it 'may' not give you enough space for the additional game, but it's worth trying... [Edit] clearly was typing slowly so lots had been covered, but to comment on a thing - Whilst the ideal is to increase the OP in this way & also have ~25% of the partitioned area as free space, the first priority is always the free space. Then, anything extra that you can give to OP is a bonus (up to the 20% ish) & then you look at a splitting any extra space between the two as you see fit... Personally, tend to prioritise OP, but i do increase the free space above the 25% min when possible.
Oh, inrelation to docs&settings above, I use junction points to point my docs&settings to my HDD's, means it looks like its on the SSD but without actually using any space as it's on the HDD, very useful
A good way... Though personally prefer to do things manually in the registry &/or within Outlook itself - just habit & all...
Just have to remember where stuff actually is when I back up, as I screwed myself over this way before...
You guys rock, thank you all for the help! Those two files alone were 11 gig, so without those that leaves me with about 28gig free. And there is another few gig of junk I can remove too. So I will have about 32gig, which is more than enough for a second game Great news Thanks again.
