Windows 7 and SSDs: Cutting your system drive down to size. Solid-state drives are wicked fast. They’re also expensive. One high-performance, low-cost strategy: Use a fast SSD as a Windows 7. Checking drive capacity in Windows 7/Vista: 1. Open The Computer Management Console a) Windows 8 b) Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 2. In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.Your disks and volumes will appear in a graphical view and list view. If you will use another standard hard drive for storage, you can use a 128GB. If this will be your only drive (such as in a laptop), I would not have less than 512GB, but many can get away with a 256GB. Space is needed for programs, files, and yo.
Over the last years computer processors have become very powerful, so powerful that most of the time they do nothing but waiting your hard drive to throw some data at them. Fortunately, disks have evolved, too and a new generation of super fast disks called Solid State Drives (SSDs) has appeared. With an SSD your computer will become noticeably faster and reliable and will consume less power. The problem is that SSDs are too expensive, so you will have to get one which is considerably smaller than a regular mechanical hard drive. Smaller drive means that rather sooner than later you will face the 'not enough free space' problem.
In this article I'm going to show you how to free up gigabytes of disk space on an SSD in Windows 7, but most of the tips also work for Windows 8 and Windows 10. Disable hibernation - will free up disk space equal to the size of your RAM. Hibernation is the process of saving the content of your computer's memory to the hard disk, which helps start if faster. Having Windows 7 installed on an SSD means that it will boot in seconds, so you won't need hibernation anymore. To turn it off you should do the following:. Click the Start button and type 'cmd'.
Right click the item that appears and select Run as administrator. In the opened DOS command prompt window type powercfg –h off and press EnterThe hibernate.sys file that is used by the hibernation process will be then deleted and you will gain disk space on your SSD equal to the size of your RAM. Decrease the size of the page file - will free up disk space almost equal to the size of your RAM. The page file represents an area of your hard drive, which is used by Windows 7 in case your computer runs out of memory (RAM).
If your desktop/laptop has enough RAM (4 GB or more), you can safely decrease the size of the page file. Some people even advise to disable the page file completely, but I don't recommend this, as some programs need it and may crash if it is disabled. System Restore creates backups of your most important system files, so that in case something goes wrong you can restore the system to a point back in time.
However, this approach is not very effective. It is best to use a disk clone utility (e.g. Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, etc.) for disk backups. The System Restore service usually uses a lot of disk space, so here's how to turn it off:. Click the Start button, right click Computer and then click Properties.
In the left pane click System Protection. Select the disk you want to turn off System Protection for and click Configure.
Select Turn off system protection, click OK, and then click OK again. Perform a Disk Cleanup regularly - will free up from several megabytes to hundreds of megabytes of disk space. Disk Cleanup is a tool integrated in Windows 7, which frees up disk space by emptying the Recycle Bin and deleting various temporary files, which are no longer needed. I recommend you run it once a month. To perform a disk cleanup do the following:.
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Click on the Start button and then on Computer. Right click on your SSD disk (by default 'C:') and select Properties. Click on Disk Cleanup to start the disk cleaning utility. It will analyze your system for a while and will show a list of items that can be safely deleted. If you want to clean up some system files as well, such as left overs of old Windows updates, click Clean up system files and make sure you select 'Windows Update Cleanup'. Select all items you want to delete and click OK.
Use a third party disk cleaning tool regularly - will free up megabytes of disk space. If you want to delete even more temporary files, you can use a third party tool. One that is very good, simple to use and I've never had any problems with is. I recommend you install it and run it once a month. When you start it:. Select the types of files you want to delete using the check boxes.
Click Analyze to see the list of files that are going to be deleted. Click the Run Cleaner button to delete the files. Uninstall programs you do not use - will free up from several megabytes to several gigabytes of disk space.
One of the things SSDs are most noticeably faster than mechanical hard drives is file access. Because of this search on an SSD is much faster than on a traditional hard disk and you don't need the content of all your files to be indexed in order to do a fast file search.
Disabling the indexing service will not only free up space on your SSD but will also boost the performance of your computer as it will no longer index any file that is written to disk. To disable the indexing service for your SSD do the following:. Click Start and then Computer (or press Windows + E from the keyboard). Right click on your SSD (e.g. 'C:') and select Properties. Uncheck the 'Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties' (should be as in the image to the right). Click OK.
In the dialog window that appears select to apply this to the drive, subfolders and files and click OK. Repeat the process for any other SSD disk partitions, tooSee also:. Hi, do not worry, hibernation and sleep are two completely different technologies, so disabling hibernation won't affect the sleep mode functionality of your computer.Basically hibernation is a process that saves the full content of your computer's RAM to the hard drive and then completely turns your PC off and when you turn it on it loads the saved on the hard drive data back to RAM, while sleep (standby) mode simply puts your computer into low power state, but does not turn it off completely, so you do not loose the content of the RAM. Hi thereOne of these actions seems to have made my clips in Adobe Premiere not work. There are grey stripes down all of them and they don't play.
I've been editing this film for nearly a year so I'm a bit devastated. I probably should have looked into it more before I did anything.
Anyway, just wondered if you knew what the default setting is for the Virtual memory before I changed it, and the File Content Indexing? I noticed a long list of things happening when I changed the file content indexing with Adobe programs and then I had to restart the computer. I hope you can help, because if I lose this work I am done. Hi, I doubt that one of these tips has caused the issues you are talking about. If done as instructed, they are all perfectly safe and I have successfully applied them to many PC-s without any problems.
Anyways, regarding your questions, the default value for the page file is 'System managed size' and File Content Indexing is set to true (checked) for the system drive.As far as I know Adobe products use a lot of memory, so if your computer does not have much RAM (e.g. 4GB or less), increase the size of the page file or set it to system managed size to see if this will solve the problem.Before reverting those settings, however, I recommend you backup your clips and project files and try to open them on another computer to see if they are ok. The issues you describe seem more like problems with the hard drive (for example appearance of bad sectors), so I strongly recommend you regularly backup your work and important files. Regular backups are recommended even for new and perfectly healthy disks.
You can't move the hibernation file, the best you can do is to disable hibernation. That file takes up almost as much space as you have RAM in your system.You can move the pagefile to a hard drive using:- Start - right-click 'Computer' and select 'Properties'- Click the 'Advanced System Settings' in the left pane- Click the 'Settings.' Button in the 'Performance' section- Click the 'Advanced' tab- Click the 'Change.' Button under 'Virtual Memory'In the 'Virtual Memory' dialogue box you select the SSD click the 'No Paging File' option, and then click the 'Set' button. Then you click a hard drive and click either 'System Managed Size' or 'Custom Size' and click the 'Set' button.It's also possible that restore points are consuming a lot of space.
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You can check this as follows:- Start - right-click 'Computer' and select 'Properties'- Click the 'Advanced System Settings' in the left pane- Click the 'Settings.' Button in the 'Performance' section- Click the 'System Protection' tabIn this dialogue box, click the SSD to select it and then click the 'Configure.' Button to see how much space is being used. If necessary, adjust the slider to reduce the amount of space allowed for restore points. Surprisingly, there are a lot of systems that can fail without a pagefile. Most notably, firefox can have serious issues.I've been running Firefox with several plug-ins on my 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate system with no page file for over a year with no issues whatsoever.I'm aware that older programs sometimes have a mysterious dependency on a page file. I was never able to run Photoshop 6 without a pagefile - I never did figure out why but my theory is that it looks for the page file drive in order to figure out what the default location for its work files would be.But I haven't yet run into any programs released within the last couple of years that are pagefile-dependent.