Windows 10: Help my SSD is filling up with pagefiles?

My Windows 11 File Explorer keeps hanging and freezing, often with no response, so I ran WinDirStat to see if there was a problem with the OS on my 256 GB SSD. I was shocked to see that a huge chunk of space occupying the OS C: was taken up by pagefile.sys with a size of 12.0 GB. Is there a way to significantly reduce this? I'm not sure if it is related, but System Restore also keeps failing, with error messages saying that it was unable to restore.Someone suggested changing the Virtual Memory may reduce the pagefile.sys space. At the moment the settings are: Automatically manage page file

:)

 

Clear Pagefile on Shutdown


I've been looking into clearing the pagefile, and I found the following steps at a somewhat dated webpage:

1. In the registry editor, navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
2. Set ClearPageFileAtShutdown to the REG_DWORD value of 1.
3. Restart Windows.

I'm just wondering whether those steps are still valid, and, if so, does clearing the pagefile work as advertised?

 

Advice on SSD for Pagefile

I really suffer from slowness and my pagefile get filled with up to 14gb, and all the time my HDD is loading

I have 2 options:
- get a 32GB ssd and just use it as dedicated pagefile, and keep using HDD for OS.
- get more 12GB ram, but I'm afraid it will not be stable on my current system and maybe I will still suffer from pagefile too. Also the 32GB SSD is cheaper.

I prefer the SSD idea, any one tried if before? will it solve my pagefile hdd loading all the time?


Thank you

 

SSD for the pagefile?

BS it has been proven before that the system will use the page file for ANYTHING cache related with ANY program before it uses the ram. The system does this on purpose to make sure their is sufficent ram to run the applications processes. that is why when disabling/shrinking the pagefile more ram is used (depending on what is cached*) and also why it is reccomended to have 4+GB.