How to solve the problem of less and less disk space during Win8 use

I used the Windows 8 system very early, and it was very fresh at first. After a while, the freshness disappeared, and I felt more complaining about the frequent problems. For example, Win8 has been used for a long time with less and less disk space. What is the solution?

Some problems needing attention

First of all, Windows is a large and complex operating system. It takes a certain amount of hard disk space, depending on the model, configuration, and installed hardware and software. Under normal circumstances, the system disk space usage of different computers is not exactly the same.

Although we can choose to install the software to a non-system disk when installing the software, Windows 8 has a new Modern app that can only be installed on the system disk and cannot be installed in another location. Such applications are run in separate "sandboxes", and data generated during program execution, such as temporary files, cache files, or other files, are also saved on the system disk.

In general, if you are installing a system on a new hard disk, it is recommended to allocate no less than 50GB of free space to the system disk. This way, as long as you don't install too many very large software, even if you don't clean it, you can generally use it for a long time without facing the problem of insufficient disk space.

Handling Hibernation Files

Many computers are now equipped with large amounts of memory, and the power-saving state of Windows sleep/hibernation requires that the system disk be divided into a volume equal to 75% of the physical memory volume. Used to save memory data after entering the power saving state. So if the computer has 8GB of physical memory installed, by default a hiberfil.sys file with a size of 8GB x 75% = 6GB will appear under the root of the system disk (the file will be hidden from view by default).

Let's first take a look at how much space your sleep files occupy in your system.

Open the Explorer window and click the right “options button under the “View” tab to open the Folder Options dialog.

Switch to the “View” tab.

Select “Show hidden files, folders and drives in “Advanced Settings> and uncheck the "Hide Protected Operating System Files (Recommended)" option.

Click “OK”.

Then open the system disk root directory, there will be a very large hiberfil.sys file.

As mentioned above, the size of the hibernation file under the default settings is 75% of the total system physical memory. This is a feature that has been added since Windows 7. In previous systems, the size of the hibernation file was equal to the total amount of physical memory. From Windows 7, we can compress it and specify a compression ratio of 50%-100%.

To further compress the hibernation file, press the Win-X key combination and select “Command Prompt (Administrator) in the menu that appears in the lower left corner of the desktop, and then open the command line. Run the following command in the window:

PowerCfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE XX

where "XX" is the ratio you want to compress, you can enter an integer between 50 and 100. The system default is “75”.

Note that if you change this value too small, it may cause a STOP 0x000000A0 INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR blue screen error during system sleep/sleep. For computers running different programs and performing different tasks, the actual available compression ratio may not be exactly the same. Some systems may use 50% compression to sleep/sleep normally, but some systems may not be lower than 60%.

Therefore, it is only recommended to modify this setting if the physical memory is very large and the system disk space is seriously insufficient. If you encounter the above blue screen error during sleep/sleep after modification, you can restart and set a larger compression ratio. Hibernation files can only be located in the root directory of the system disk and cannot be set to other hard disk partitions.

Processing of paging files

The above picture also lists a pagefile.sys file that is over 4GB in size. This is the paging file.

By design, Windows and applications will move data that has been saved to memory but not used to the hard disk during use to free up valuable memory for other programs. If the program needs to use the memory data moved to the hard disk, it will be read back into the memory.

The memory management mechanism of the operating system controls the entire process. Usually the paging file is managed by the operating system, and the normal user does not need to modify the relevant settings. However, if you want to transfer the paging file to another hard disk partition due to insufficient hard disk space, or you want to modify the size of the paging file, you can do the following:

Open the Control Panel and click “System and Security" “System”.

Then click on “Advanced System Settings” on the left side of the window and click the “Settings> button under the "Performance" option.

Open the “Advanced" tab, click “Change", and you will see the interface shown below.

Invert the "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" option and select a partition other than the system disk from the hard disk partition list.

Select “System Managed Size", this will continue to let the system automatically manage the paging file, but will transfer the paging file to our designated target partition. Or you can select “Custom Size" here, then enter “Initial Size> and “Maximum", to save the paging file to other partitions and limit the amount of hard disk space occupied by the file.

Then click “Set”, then click “OK”. Note here: you must first click the “Set” button, otherwise the changes will not take effect.

Follow the on-screen prompts to restart the system to complete the changes.

In general, it is recommended to set only the paging file to a non-system disk. In addition, for computers with multiple physical hard disks, you can also consider saving the paging file to a hard disk that is not used to install the operating system and other applications, so that when busy, the IO operations and paging IO operations of the system and program can be Different hard disk processing helps improve performance.

Note: There has always been a controversy on the Internet. In today's physical memory is getting bigger and bigger, is it necessary to completely disable paging files? After all, the read and write speed of the hard disk will seriously impair the overall performance. For this question, the author's personal opinion is: It is best not to do this! If you do not want paging files to take up too much hard disk space, at least consider setting a smaller page file, but do not completely disable it.