Monday, November 5, 2018

windows 7 - Hard drive showing incorrect free space after recent RAM upgrade


After recently upgrading my ram from 8GB to 16GB I noticed that my hard drive went from ~22GB to ~8GB (120GB ssd) even though all of files on the drive only accumulate to 72GB. I have tried numerous things such as changing the size allocation for system restore points; from 5% to now 2%, and various other disc clean up tools.


I had a look at changing the size of the virtual memory allocation as I think this is a variable depending on the amount of RAM installed on the computer and would explain why the free space on my hard drive shrunk after upgrading the RAM. Is it advisable to change this allocation or should I just learn to live with the fact that my free space on my hard drive has shrunk since upgrading?


Answer



This is because the Windows page file has increased along with the new amount of RAM.


This is so that when you sleep the computer, all the contents of the RAM are written to the drive the OS is installed on. In case of a power failure for example, powering on the computer will read these files from the drive onto the RAM and the system will boot as if it has just been woken up from sleep.


Moving this to a secondary location is a good idea when using an SSD as your OS install disk. Especially if your drive space is lower than 20GB free. The free space will fluctuate in any case due to caches and various other things so it's a good idea to keep a large amount free to keep your system running fast.


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