How to make memory usable again after filling system drive on win7

-1

A few days ago i filled completely the C (system) drive on my win7 laptop.

I didn't realize it was so full, now i deleted many things and i bought a new drive to use for data.

When the disk was full i got an error i didn't copy that said something like "HD is full, page size could now grow more than needed".

After this (and after rebooting) i have memory issues (Windows asks me to close some applications - Embarcadero RAD STUDIO XE2 and Outlook 2010 mainly - because they use too much ram).

i tried to play with page file in control panel by:

1) removing it

2) setting it as auto managed (this was the default)

3) setting it to min 16000 - max 32000

In all cases i had problems. Now I put 10000-60000 just to hope i can work 2 hours without rebooting.

Note: when i have errors page file has reached the max allowed limit.

Does anyone has a solution?

user193655

Posted 2014-02-18T09:23:01.610

Reputation: 165

1You may have some file left over from when the problem occurred somewhere on your hard disk -- perhaps in your C:\temp folder. Look around and see what taking up all the space. If you find something that looks like junk then copy it to some other drive (or back it up somehow), delete it, and then see if things improve. – martineau – 2014-02-18T10:22:18.420

The biggest files in my HD (found with https://windirstat.info/) are Outlook pst file, a Virtual box VM + pagefile.sys (9.8MB) and hyberfil.sys (5,9 GB)

– user193655 – 2014-02-18T11:18:10.730

after setting 10k-60k i still have a running machine with 10MB pagefile. – user193655 – 2014-02-18T11:19:35.383

1All thosh files look legit. How much free space do you have on the hard disk? Your page file should be at least as big as the amount of RAM you have (probably multi-GBs). You need to understand that all those memory setting are in KBs, so 10K-60K is 10-60 GB -- quite a lot and probably way too much. – martineau – 2014-02-18T12:45:54.843

I have 8 GB of RAM, 60GB is 7,5 times more i know, anyway my pc is impossible to use. I hope there is a way to fix this without reformatting. My pc was outstanding until 2 days ago. – user193655 – 2014-02-19T16:35:29.923

I noticed that from time to time dllhost.exe eats up to 4GB of Ram in my task manager/processes. What is this? – user193655 – 2014-02-19T17:18:13.527

1I'd either let Windows manage your page file size or set it to min 8K, max 12K. Also, if you disable Hibernation, it should get rid of the hyberfil.sys file. – martineau – 2014-02-19T19:59:51.400

I tried to disable hibernate as exaplined here http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/819-hibernate-enable-disable.html i now wait one more painful day.

– user193655 – 2014-02-20T09:46:48.223

1The method explained in the sevenforum link should do the trick. I use it in a .bat script to toggle hibernation on just before it puts the system in that state (and then turn it off after it wakes up). No sense wasting all that disk space 24/7... – martineau – 2014-02-20T09:53:54.910

anyway it is not an issue of disk space, my systems slows down drastically after a few hours of usage, now i have 80GB of free HD and a pagefile managed by the system. The only strange things happened in last days are: 1) i used hibernate once, 2) my HD was full. THanks. – user193655 – 2014-02-20T09:55:42.773

no way, pc just crashed. i do bounty now. I t is the 1st time i feel win7 is worse than linux – user193655 – 2014-02-20T12:11:32.253

When you start getting these error message, could you take and post a screen-capture of the Performance tab in Task Manager? – harrymc – 2014-02-24T08:58:28.787

See the accepted answer, that wsa the solution and my pc is rocking since last week again – user193655 – 2014-03-05T08:15:54.087

Answers

I had a problem days ago with a mp4 file I was not able to delete from my desktop, but I could not tell it was the issue.

I found this answer from answers.microsoft.com:

The problem appears when dllhost.exe attempts to create a thumbnail of an mp4 file, but for some reason cannot complete the task, and starts reading the hard drive non stop and filling all phisical Ram, and starts using the swap file (virtual memory file wich uses hard drive space as ram memory), slowing down or freezing the computer. The cause is probably an error in the integrated mp4 windows codecs.

Anyway, the solution is to download and install a freeware program wich generates all video files thumbnails instead of windows. It even creates thumbails of flash (flv) files!

You can download it from this link:

http://www.free-codecs.com/Media_Preview_download.htm

Or googleing Media Preview 1.3.1.343

user193655

Posted 2014-02-18T09:23:01.610

Reputation: 165

Could you include the relevant information from that link in your answer? So that if the link dies, your answer will still be useful for someone reading it. – Vidar Ramdal – 2014-02-25T14:46:42.593

Done, see quote above – user193655 – 2014-03-05T08:13:56.097

What's happening here is that your system RAM is full and the system tries to swap out memory to the pagefile. Since your %SYSTEMDRIVE% is also full, this fails. You need to clean up your system.

First you need space to operate. Disable hibernation first. Open a command line interface as an administrator, then run:

powercfg /hibernate off

Second, disable your pagefile for a moment.

wmic pagefileset delete where name=c:\pagefile.sys

Reboot and use the built in cleanmgr.exe or use a 3rd party tool such as ccleaner (this tool can also clean up your registry and application caches) to remove cruft from your systemdrive. After you have done so, reboot again. If you have about 10% of your systemdrive freed, you should consider running a defragmentation tool now. Depending on your disk size this can take very long. After that enable both files again:

powercfg /hibernate on

wmic pagefileset create where name=<your-desired-path>

This will create a hibernation file roughly the same size of your system RAM and a pagefile that is managed by the operating system. Avoid putting the pagefile on an external drive.

bjanssen

Posted 2014-02-18T09:23:01.610

Reputation: 2 289

You said that you ought a new drive. Did you tell Windows that it can put its page file on the new drive? Since that's still rather empty (I presume), Windows shouldn't have problems finding free space there.

MSalters

Posted 2014-02-18T09:23:01.610

Reputation: 7 587

for now i just bought a new drive, still in the shipping phase. Anyway now in my c drive I have lot of free space. ANyway the system becomes unstable after a while, i get a "close the following apps because memory is low". i feel my system is in a kind of emergency mode that was enabled once i filled my c drive. I would like to diagnose this, – user193655 – 2014-02-21T07:56:30.467