Hiberfil.sys, Pagefile.sys & the new Swapfile.sys file in Windows 10/8



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The Windows operating system contains several system files necessary for its proper operation. Some of them are Swapfile.sys, Hiberfil.sys & Pagefile.sys. To view these system files on the root of your system drive (C), you must display the protected operating system files in the folder options. In this article, we will briefly discuss each issue.

Hiberfil.sys

The Hiberfil.sys file is a system file used by Windows to support Hibernation. If you enabled Hibernation on Windows 8/10, you will see this file.

Read: Disable, hibernate under Windows 10/8

If you enabled Hibernation then Fast Startup (which is the default value), your Hiberfil.sys file will represent about 3/4 of your memory. So you can see that the Hiberfil.sys file is 6.6GB in my case, because I have 8GB of RAM. If you have disabled Hibernation, you will notice that the size is approximately the size of your RAM.

.sys works wildly if you have enabled Hibernation. In the previous version of Windows, the kernel session, device drivers and application data were saved in the hibernation file. Under Windows 10/8, the hibernation file only stores the kernel session and device drivers, keeping the size more or less constant.

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If you wish, you can disable/enable hibernation manually or with our Ultimate Windows Tweaker or a Microsoft patch at any time. But remember that under Windows 8 / 10, this also disables quick start.

Paging file.sys

Pagefile.sys where the page file is the paging file that your Windows uses as virtual memory. PageFile.sys contains overloaded memory objects that have not been accessed for a long time. When Windows no longer has physical memory, it accesses the page file by writing some of the RAM content to disk. When this’swapped out’ memory is needed again, another part is written to the hard disk and this part is read back. You can learn more about paging files on TechNet.

If you often receive a message Your system has little virtual memory when you try to start a memory-intensive application, you can enlarge the paging file. The page file size on my Windows 8 PC is about 1.2 GB.

Delete Pagefile.sys

Cleaning the page file at each stop means that the data is overwritten with zeros, and this takes time. This increases downtime. However, if you are working on confidential documents, you should set this setting to’on’. When you load such documents, they are loaded into memory. To save RAM, Windows places certain items in the paging file. Therefore, in such cases, it may be useful to delete the paging file at each stop. Open Regedit and navigate to the next key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet ControlSet Session Manager Memory Management

In the right pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) value. Name the value DWORD ClearPageFileAtShutdown and give it the value 1.

Paging file.sys

In earlier versions of Windows, you had Swapfile.sys or the swap file. The swap file contains objects ejected from memory that should be inaccessible for some time and allows an operating system to use additional disk space to simulate additional memory if the system has little disk space by replacing a portion of the RAM that an inactive program uses on the hard disk to free memory for other programs. This combination of RAM and swap files is called virtual memory. With an exchange file, the file

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