fredrico enconi elastrego said:
hi,
my disk seems to be more full than usual. when i shut my
system off this morning the disk space free was 500mb on
my windows drive, now when i turned it on again, the free
disk space was 35mb, 2 files seem to be taking up a lot
of space...
1.hiberfil 380mb
2.pagefile 600mb
can i delete them, how important are they?
'hiberfil.sys' is part of the "Power management" for Windows Hibernation.
You must still have it on - probably cannot delete the file while the
service is still going. Look into turning it off through Start -> Help and
Support -> search for "power management hibernation". I don't have this
file, so I bet if you turn hibernation off, you either will find it gone or
you can delete it safely.
'pagefile.sys' on the other hand is pretty important. I cannot remember a
version of NT without it - it's pretty much needed.
This is a 'file' generated/used by NT/W2K/WXP as 'virtual' memory; that part
of the drive behaves as though it was RAM... When physical RAM is fully used
and there is need for more, infomation/data not currently being accessed can
be 'swapped' to that location and thus free physical RAM for immediate use.
That same data can be transferred back if need be into physical RAM at any
time. If the Page-file (Swap-file) is being overly accessed/used then one
would normally add extra RAM; extra RAM is the simplest way (usually the
cheapest too) to improve overall performance of a given system.
Without some area so defined (on the hard-drive) NT/W2K/XP will not run
properly, especially when running applications that demand/use large areas
of RAM. Size (and location) can be set by default or as you prefer. So it is
not wise to remove it completely under normal circumstances.
More info:
http://tinyurl.com/ey17
http://tinyurl.com/ey19
All Windows OS have a similar 'file'; in '9x (ME) it's generally referred to
a Swap-file'.
More on that definition see:
http://tinyurl.com/ey1c
Good Luck!
--
Shenan Stanley
"Just trying to help"
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