Can I do without minimum 400Mb pagefile on C:.... 2 pagefiles?

Question

I have 8Gb RAM, a C: drive of 60Gb SSD with only 250Mb left, and a Pagefile of 2Gb on the C:. C: is for Windows 7 64bit, system programmes, Office, iTunes, IE, N360 and all paid for programmes. All free programmes and user data are on another drive D: 7200rpm 1Tb Surveillance WD 24/7 Purple drive (new on 5 Mar 2015).

I want to free up space on C:.

Because I keep getting Windows warnings about low memory on the C: drive I have created a 12,288Mb pagefile (recommended size) on the D: drive. But when I try to set C: drive pagefile to "no paging file" I get a 400Mb minimum warning.

Is this a real issue? I have seen the warnings in forums about crash dumps. As a home user do I need crash dumps? But would a crash dump not go to the D: pagefile instead?

So, do I have to have a minimum 400Mb on C:?

Is it okay to have 2 pagefiles?

This is not about performance, system is fast enough, it's just to release space on the C: drive.

Any assistance gratefully received.

Answer 1

Keep the 400MB which is the default allocation. That's enough. No need for a pagefile on another drive. Here are some tips how to regain some space:

1. If you do not use hibernation, run this command in elevated command prompt:

   powercfg -h off

That should free up 8GB

2. Run the procedure decribed here

3. Run this command:

   vssadmin list shadowstorage

What is the ALLOCATED and what is the MAXIMUM. If the MAXIMUM is more than 4GB, run this command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=4GB

4. Run this program and check whether you have any big chunks of data that could be deleted. It is easy to check in the colored picture. Just click on the boxes.

Answer 2

I ran my main family computer (Windows 7 with 8GB) for two years with no page file at all with few problems. I figured that any time I needed more than 8GB there was a serious memory issue anyway and I'd rather just have the errant program stop with an out of memory error rather than have the whole system slowly crawl to a halt as memory started paging. As long as you have plenty of RAM, you will be fine, but you may need to watch how much RAM you typically use to figure out how much is enough. Any spare RAM will be used for caching, so if you have a reasonable amount of RAM either free or in use by the cache when you're doing your most memory-intensive stuff, you're good to go.

Ideally, you really want the pagefile on the SSD if you're going to have one, but I know it can be tricky to get stuff split across drives--I had the same situation with a 128GB SSD C drive, putting the user files on a 2TB HDD D drive.