windows 7 reduce swap space on SSD

Question

System: Windows 7 installed on 120 GB SSD 1 TB RAID 1 Hard Drive 16 GB RAM Radeon 7850 Intel i5 chip

Brand new. No software on. There is nothing to compress or cleanup.

I only have 71.5 gbs out of 117 gbs left on my SSD. I only got 16 gbs of RAM because it was a $40 upgrade from 8 gbs. I don't think I will ever fill it up. Can I reduce the swap space ? I don't think I need 16 gbs of swap space. I doubt I would ever fill up 16 gbs of RAM. I am not going to play 3 games at once. If so what can I reduce it to?

Also, would turning off hybernate free up space? I don't really need this also. The system boots up really fast. When I googed this, I only saw a command line interface to turn it off, so I am hesitant that this may not be supported.

Answer 1

You can reduce the size, but do leave some swap space. Some programs and parts of Windows will give weird errors and might crash your PC when there's no swap space. I was recommended to keep it between 512MB and 1024MB.

To reduce it, follow this: (from here)

1. Open System by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, and then clicking System.

2. In the left pane, click Advanced system settings. Administrator permission required If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

3. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.

4. Click the Advanced tab, and then, under Virtual memory, click Change.

5. Clear the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box.

6. Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.

7. Click Custom size, type a new size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box, click Set, and then click OK.

It is also safe to disable hibernate on your PC. The command line is the only way I know of. It is also the same procedure I followed.

You could also create a RAMDisk for your temp folders, this way you can use some of your spare RAM and reduce the strain on your SSD a bit. All the necessary info is available in the manual provided on their website.

Answer 2

If you do not use hibernate then it is safe to turn hibernate off via powercfg.

If you are confident that you will rarely use swap then you can reduce the swap file to a few hundred MB. (windows always seems to use a few MB, but even on a 120GB SSD you will not miss 100MB or 200MB for swap.

The system I am typing this on a desktop with a configuration similar you yours. Small SSD (Intel postvile G2, 80GB), 18GB RAM and a HW RAID for storage of large files. I disabled hibernate and lowered swap to 16MB. It has worked like a charm for years. :)

Also, without these large files and with most restore point removed I use 17GB for win7(x64), open office, firefox, thunderbird, putty, opera etc... This is about half the the space your install currently uses.

Answer 3

To change the size of your paging file, go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced system settings (on the left) -> Advanced tab -> Performance Settings -> Advanced tab -> Change Virtual Memory. Uncheck the box for "Automatically manage paging file size" and then set the values below.

If you want to keep a small paging file (1-4 gigs), select "Custom size" and set the initial and maximum sizes to the same values. You can also opt to disable the paging file. Click "Set" when you are finished, and reboot.

I often disable the paging file on my machines. Be warned that some games and applications can require a paging file, although I've never seen this myself.

Answer 4

Disable hibernation by selecting power options from control panel and turn off hybrid sleep. Then in an admin level command prompt type "powercfg -h off" - without the quotes. The first bit of that may not be strictly necessary but I think it prudent. I have run XP and Win 7 without a swap file and have never had any problems; normally with a healthy amount of RAM but only 12Gb in Win 7 and I don't play games. You can also gain some space on your SSD by limiting the amount of space available to System Restore. With no page file, no hibernation, no system restore and all my personal folders on another drive my system disk is currently using about 19Gb of space.