Tips on How to Free Disk Space on Your PC or Server

I have noticed a lot of people on the internet having issues with their hard drives filling up "mysteriously" and they are not sure what to do to reclaim some of that disk space. I've already written a handful of articles that touch on various consumers of disk space, so I am going to bring all of them together in one place for your convenience. I will keep adding to this page as I write more articles that are along these same lines.

How to Configure Your Page File to Save Disk Space

Written by Greg Kjono

There are a couple of hidden files that typically use up a lot of disk space, especially in systems that have large amounts of RAM. These are the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. Hiberfil.sys can be deleted if you don't use the hibernation feature. Instructions on how to do that are available at http://nerdsknowbest.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-to-delete-hiberfilsys-on-windows.html.

I don't recommend completely removing the pagefile, especially on desktops and laptops, however. You can configure them to not use so much disk space though. By default they are set to "system managed" and are probably close in size to the amount of memory you have in your PC. Chances are that you aren't actually using most of that space in the page file, and that your computer is just allocating that space in case it needs it in the future.