pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys queries

[Lanackse-Kanvae]

OK so I was using a space sniffing program to sniff out where my hard drive is being eaten.

Two things that stood out were the system files pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys (.sys extension kinda gave that away).

pagefile.sys was 7.9 GB and hiberfil.sys was 5.9 GB (yes I am correctly using the uppercase B for bytes)

A cursory research tells me that the former is Virtual RAM and the latter is hibernation settings related.

Do I still need Virtual RAM when the system has 8 GB system RAM and has it's own dedicated GPU RAM for the graphics?

I never use hibernation on this machine. It's either being used for something or it's off.

Any way I can safely trim/remove those without ******** my machine over?

Thanks in advance. If you need more info, I won't be on until very much later (playing Pathfinder) but I will be happy to answer any questions that will help.

[Synapt]

Pagefile is pretty much always (when automatically handled by windows) the same exact as your usable RAM, I've never quite understood why it does that, but yes you still want a page file of some sort. Windows can get somewhat... cranky when pagefile is completely disabled (to the point programs won't even work/run right), but with 8GB of memory you can probably reduce the pagefile some or move it to a secondary drive if you have one. Alternatively if you've got USB3 at all, get a cheap-ish few-GB USB3 thumbdrive and set it up for the pagefile (USB3 rocks a good 5Gbit at theoretical max, which is slightly lower than SATA3's maximum but higher than SATAII's maximum, so it makes them a good pagefile/ramdrive handler if you support USB3).

As for hiberfil, you are correct, it's a file reserved as long as hibernation is 'enabled' at all, even if it never triggers, and it'll allocate around 75% of your total system RAM in reserve for that file. You can safely delete this file as long as hibernation is disabled, which you can read how to do here (they also give you a quick little 'fix' file you can download that will do it all automatically).