large OS ?

[ThePainter]

Hi,

I backup my system every week with Norton Ghost , My OS
is usually about 4.5 GB , last week I decided to get rid
of old files and programs so I deleted and uninstalled
defraged etc. And cleaned out all of my cashes and temps.

I then came to backup this morning only to find that my
OS is 6.5 GB ?

I had a look at my system with a program that shows a map
of your OS and the two huge files that seem to have grown
over the week are "pagefile.sys & hiberfil.sys" .

Does anyone know what they are and why they grow so big
so fast and why do they need to be so big when they did
not needto be that big last week ?

 

[Tom Barclay]

Pagefile.sys is your system's swap file, and hiberfil.sys is where your
system stores all your settings, etc when it goes into hibernation mode. You
must have had a lot of data in both when you backed up your system.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Pagefile.sys is your system's swap file, and hiberfil.sys is where your
system stores all your settings, etc when it goes into hibernation mode. You
must have had a lot of data in both when you backed up your system.

The initial size of the pagefile may be bigger than necessary: you can
try setting initial smaller (leave Max high) and see if it increases.
See more at www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

Hiberfil is going to be the size of RAM. It does not need to be backed
up: if you disable hibernation in Power Options - Hibernate before the
backup, the file will immediately disappear, and you can turn
hibernation on again afterwards - if you use it