I used the Windows 8 system a long time ago. The novelty was very strong at first. After a while, the novelty disappeared, and I felt more like complaints about frequent problems. For example, after using Win8 for a long time, the disk space is getting less and less. What are the solutions?

Some issues that need attention

First of all, it should be noted that Windows is a large and complex operating system, which itself requires a certain amount of hard disk space. It depends on different models, configurations, and installed software and hardware. Under normal circumstances, the system disk space occupied by 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 added a new Modern application, which can only be installed to the system disk and cannot be installed in other locations. Such applications run in mutually isolated "sandboxes", and data generated during the running of the program, such as temporary files, cache files, or other files, will also be saved on the system disk.

Under normal circumstances, if you are installing the system on a new hard disk, it is recommended to allocate no less than 50GB of free space to the system disk. In this way, as long as too many very large software are not installed, even if it is not cleaned, it can generally be used for a long time without facing the problem of insufficient disk space.

Handling hibernation files

Many computers are now equipped with large-capacity memory, and Windows’ energy-saving states such as sleep/hibernation require that a space equal to 75% of the physical memory volume be allocated on the system disk to save memory data after entering the energy-saving state. Therefore, if the computer has 8GB of physical memory installed, a hiberfil.sys file with a size of 8GB x 75% = 6GB will appear in the root directory of the system disk by default (the file will be hidden and invisible by default).

First let’s take a look at how much space the hibernation file takes up in your system.

Open the Explorer window and click the "Options" button on the right under the "View" tab to open the Folder Options dialog box.

Switch to the "View" tab.

Select "Show hidden files, folders, and drives" in "Advanced Settings" and deselect the "Hide protected operating system files (recommended)" option. ​

Click "OK".

Then open the root directory of the system disk, and a very large hiberfil.sys file will appear here.

As mentioned above, the hibernation file size under default settings is 75% of the total physical memory of the system. This is a feature added starting with Windows 7. In previous systems, the hibernation file size was equal to the total physical memory. Starting 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, select "Command Prompt (Administrator)" from the menu that appears in the lower left corner of the desktop, and run the following command in the subsequently opened command line window:

PowerCfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE XX

Where "XX" is the ratio you want to compress, and you can enter 50-100 here. An integer between, the system default value is "75".

It should be noted that if the value is modified too small, it may cause a STOP 0x000000A0 INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR blue screen error when the system hibernates/sleeps. For computers running different programs and performing different tasks, the actual available compression rates may not be exactly the same. Maybe some systems can sleep/sleep normally with a compression rate of 50%, but some systems may not be able to go below 60%.

Therefore, it is only recommended to modify this setting when the physical memory is very large and the system disk space is seriously insufficient. If you encounter the above blue screen error during hibernation/sleep after modification, you can restart and set a larger compression ratio. The hibernation file 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 figure also lists a pagefile.sys file with a volume of more than 4GB, which is the paging file.

According to the design, during use, Windows and applications will move data that has been saved in memory but is not used temporarily to the hard disk to free up valuable memory space for use by other programs. If the program needs to use the memory data that has been moved to the hard disk, it will be re-read into the memory.

The memory management mechanism of the operating system controls the entire process. Usually the paging file can be managed by the operating system, and ordinary users do not need to modify related settings. However, if you want to transfer the paging file to another hard disk partition due to insufficient hard disk space, or want to modify the size of the paging file, you can perform the following operations:

Open the Control Panel and click "System and Security" - "System".

Then click "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 then you will see the interface shown below.

Uncheck 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" so that the system can continue to automatically manage the paging file, but the paging file will be transferred to the target partition we specify. Or you can select "Custom size" here, and then enter the "Initial size" and "Maximum value", so that the paging file can be saved to other partitions and limit the hard disk space occupied by the file.

Then click "Settings" and then click "OK". Note here: You must click the "Settings" button first, otherwise the changes will not take effect.

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

Under normal circumstances, it is recommended to only set 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. This way, during busy times, the IO operations of the system and program running and the paging IO operations can be processed by different hard disks, which helps to improve performance.

Note: There has been a debate on the Internet about whether it is necessary to completely disable the paging file as physical memory becomes larger and larger. After all, the read and write speed of the hard disk will seriously drag down the overall performance. My personal opinion on this issue is: It’s best not to do this! If you don’t want the paging file to take up too much hard disk space, you can at least consider setting a smaller paging file, but don’t disable it completely.