# Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with 12 GB RAM



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Hi, 

I ran into a problem downloading SP1 where I am out of disk space. I am considering running without a page file. Has anyone done this with success?


----------



## Davenlr (Sep 16, 2006)

Load everything you normally run at once, then look at your memory usage. If you have more real memory free than you are using for your pagefile (assuming its still set on automatic), then you should have no problems. Curious why you dont just upgrade the hard drive tho, or is this a laptop?


----------



## phat78boy (Sep 12, 2007)

Its not a good idea to run without a pagefile, even if you have more then enough memory. The pagefile is used for more that what is conventionally thought and could impact other performance items on your machine. 

I would, however, recommend lowering the pagefile well below the recommended size with your amount of RAM. Possibly as low as 500MB, but 1GB would be a bit safer.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Davenlr said:


> Load everything you normally run at once, then look at your memory usage. If you have more real memory free than you are using for your pagefile (assuming its still set on automatic), then you should have no problems. Curious why you dont just upgrade the hard drive tho, or is this a laptop?


It has always only used 2 GB of physical, I never tweaked it.

The drive is a SSD 64 GB. I paid a handsome price for it May of 2009 when it first came out. Now a 128 GB drive is on $220-ish. I may upgrade the drive to something bigger.

I just got off of MS's site and it says if you have the RAM to go without it, it should use the physical RAM which should be a boost. But that document was for XP 64 bit (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654) I can't find anything specific on Windows 7.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Try running CCleaner, and clear out your Internet Explorer/Firefox/Chrome cache as well as the temp folder. That might be enough to install the SP1.


----------



## phat78boy (Sep 12, 2007)

Here, Virtual Memory - Best Strategy, is a quick forum hit with a reply from a MS engineer on the same topic.

The problem with turning it off is mostly with legacy software, although there is still some current software that also looks for a pagefile. Also, any crash dumps and some other log/reports that utilize the pagefile for their statistics and dump site may have issues. While its not really recommended, you can certainly run without it if wanted with minimal impacts.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

I removed the page file, and did all the usual clean up stuff and was shy with only 19.7 GB. I am compressing the drive now. What a PIA! 

Without a page file it runs pretty well, I will try to stick with 64 bit applications in which case I should be ok, at least until I get the SP1 loaded. 

I guess I better splurge for a new SSD.


----------



## Davenlr (Sep 16, 2006)

You can always search for offloadable files, such as MPG and ZIP. I know a lot of program installers keep copies of the original zips in their directory even after unzipping them to do their installs. Compressing the drive pretty much negates the speed from the SSD doesnt it?


----------



## JcT21 (Nov 30, 2004)

im running windows 7 professional 64 with 12gb ram & core i7 cpu... i have the intel ssd 80gb drive. i also paid a handsome price for it when it first came out. wish i hadda waited a bit on that one...

for about a year ive not used a pagefile. never once had a problem or any kind of error message about it. i recently did a fresh install with sp1. everything went smoothly.


----------



## neomaine (Feb 3, 2003)

smiddy said:


> I removed the page file, and did all the usual clean up stuff and was shy with only 19.7 GB. I am compressing the drive now. What a PIA!
> 
> Without a page file it runs pretty well, I will try to stick with 64 bit applications in which case I should be ok, at least until I get the SP1 loaded.
> 
> I guess I better splurge for a new SSD.


SSD for your OS drive? Compressing your OS drive? You defraging next? :eek2:

That's a lot of writes for an SSD drive... This get's you what, a quicker boot? Pretty high premium for not much payback.


----------



## RasputinAXP (Jan 23, 2008)

neomaine said:


> SSD for your OS drive? Compressing your OS drive? You defraging next? :eek2:
> 
> That's a lot of writes for an SSD drive... This get's you what, a quicker boot? Pretty high premium for not much payback.


I'm running a laptop with a 128GB SSD. It's well worth it. My battery life's somewhere around 6 hours on my E6410.


----------



## neomaine (Feb 3, 2003)

Ahhhh, for batery life. Being a mostly desktop user, that wouldn't have occured to me. Ok, it didn't. Now THERE'S is a price/reward that I can understand for SSD.

Though, I'd still max the memory and avoid as much pagefile usage as possible. Not sure how much the technology has changed - but - with a max number of writes, putting the OS on it is one way to use up it's lifespan.


----------



## TBlazer07 (Feb 5, 2009)

smiddy said:


> It has always only used 2 GB of physical, I never tweaked it.
> 
> The drive is a SSD 64 GB. I paid a handsome price for it May of 2009 when it first came out. Now a 128 GB drive is on $220-ish. I may upgrade the drive to something bigger.
> 
> I just got off of MS's site and it says if you have the RAM to go without it, it should use the physical RAM which should be a boost. But that document was for XP 64 bit (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654) I can't find anything specific on Windows 7.


I'm running a pair of 120GIG Vertex SSD's in raid-0. Have 8gigs RAM. Have never used a pagefile. Never had a problem. In fact, on the OCZ forum they suggest NOT using a pagefile. The only time you MIGHT have a problem is if you run out of RAM and at the same time your system crashes. Your logs won't get saved.

Edit: I've also read you should never compress SSD drives .... don't know why, but if it's on the internet it has to be true.


----------



## neomaine (Feb 3, 2003)

Not sure about compression. As long as the compress happens with CPU and RAM I wouldn't worry about it too much. Generally with compression it's with high read environments. You wouldn't/shouldn't have heavy read to a compressed drive/dir/file.

Defrag on the other hand, absolutely not. Unlike magnetic (or other) drives with read heads where it's very advantageous to have your files contiguous and large open areas to allow new files to have a contiguous area to be written to, with SSD there are built in algorithms to randomly write the data around the drive to minimize the use of each bit. I believe each vendor has their own method of doing something similar to a defrag. So, DEFINITELY turn off any regular scheduled Windows defrag. (I'm mildly sure that Win7 is SSD aware and disables defrags for that drive type, if known. I highly doubt Vista or XP would do that.)

With a write lifespan, SSDs need to be treated differently.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

JcT21 said:


> im running windows 7 professional 64 with 12gb ram & core i7 cpu... i have the intel ssd 80gb drive. i also paid a handsome price for it when it first came out. wish i hadda waited a bit on that one...
> 
> for about a year ive not used a pagefile. never once had a problem or any kind of error message about it. i recently did a fresh install with sp1. everything went smoothly.


Thanks, I haven't tried the drastic step of removing and reinstalling windows. I did get up to 20.9 GB, but I still get an error. So SP1 fails. Without a pagefile it is running fairly nicely, though I never get into the 3rd GB of RAM. I also have an i7 Extreme on ASUS Gene II. I guess I need to purchase a new drive or unstall MS Office may do the trick, then reinstall it after words (it never let me put it on the secondary drive).


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Davenlr said:


> You can always search for offloadable files, such as MPG and ZIP. I know a lot of program installers keep copies of the original zips in their directory even after unzipping them to do their installs. Compressing the drive pretty much negates the speed from the SSD doesnt it?


I have Zune installed too, which will not allow me to put it on the secondary drive. I will try removing it too.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

neomaine said:


> SSD for your OS drive? Compressing your OS drive? You defraging next? :eek2:
> 
> That's a lot of writes for an SSD drive... This get's you what, a quicker boot? Pretty high premium for not much payback.


No need to defrag a SSD... 

But yeah, quicker boot process, speed of OS too (no pagefile now). It was pretty spendy back then, I can go with a $240 SDD at 128 GB now. Compared to space of a 2 TB drive, it may seem rediculous.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

TBlazer07 said:


> I'm running a pair of 120GIG Vertex SSD's in raid-0. Have 8gigs RAM. Have never used a pagefile. Never had a problem. In fact, on the OCZ forum they suggest NOT using a pagefile. The only time you MIGHT have a problem is if you run out of RAM and at the same time your system crashes. Your logs won't get saved.
> 
> Edit: I've also read you should never compress SSD drives .... don't know why, but if it's on the internet it has to be true.


Compression only yeilded about a Gig...I will remove the compression once I get a new drive to replace this one.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

neomaine said:


> Not sure about compression. As long as the compress happens with CPU and RAM I wouldn't worry about it too much. Generally with compression it's with high read environments. You wouldn't/shouldn't have heavy read to a compressed drive/dir/file.
> 
> Defrag on the other hand, absolutely not. Unlike magnetic (or other) drives with read heads where it's very advantageous to have your files contiguous and large open areas to allow new files to have a contiguous area to be written to, with SSD there are built in algorithms to randomly write the data around the drive to minimize the use of each bit. I believe each vendor has their own method of doing something similar to a defrag. So, DEFINITELY turn off any regular scheduled Windows defrag. (I'm mildly sure that Win7 is SSD aware and disables defrags for that drive type, if known. I highly doubt Vista or XP would do that.)
> 
> With a write lifespan, SSDs need to be treated differently.


Win 7 recognized SSDs and turns defrag off and a few other things.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Thanks everyone, but alas after toying with it I got up to 20.9 GB and after the reboot, the SP1 failed and reverted back. It took for ever for it to run the install too, from 3 pm until 7 pm...space must have been the problem???

New drive will be ordered tomorrow.


----------



## neomaine (Feb 3, 2003)

You should give up the pc/laptop hardware business and concetrate on MarioKart. Oh, no ... wait ... nevermind, stick with the hardware stuff.


----------



## wingrider01 (Sep 9, 2005)

smiddy said:


> Thanks everyone, but alas after toying with it I got up to 20.9 GB and after the reboot, the SP1 failed and reverted back. It took for ever for it to run the install too, from 3 pm until 7 pm...space must have been the problem???
> 
> New drive will be ordered tomorrow.


there are methods of moving the user directory off of drive c: running a system with a 80GB Intel SSD drive, have 55.2 GB free. I moved the entoer user directory to a 500GB 7200 RPM drive that is designated u:. The directory was moved when I did a fresh install of W7 Ultimatre 64Bit, I also changed the default location for the Program files, both x86 and x64. only thing that resides on the ssd is the windows os.


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

neomaine said:


> You should give up the pc/laptop hardware business and concetrate on MarioKart. Oh, no ... wait ... nevermind, stick with the hardware stuff.


Ouch, ever since I moved to manual I haven;t been able to keep up with you.  I don't race much anymore though. :lol:


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

wingrider01 said:


> there are methods of moving the user directory off of drive c: running a system with a 80GB Intel SSD drive, have 55.2 GB free. I moved the entoer user directory to a 500GB 7200 RPM drive that is designated u:. The directory was moved when I did a fresh install of W7 Ultimatre 64Bit, I also changed the default location for the Program files, both x86 and x64. only thing that resides on the ssd is the windows os.


Whoa, we need to talk then. I purchased a new drive already, Crucial SSD 128GB 410 MB/s read...

The user directory and the program directories, if I could move those that would be a couple of GB. Can you point me to directions on how to do this, there are some environment variables that need to change and I'm sure there are some registry entries too.


----------



## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I'm still not convinced in your moves - 20 GB should be more then enough to run SP1.


> For the installation of SP1 RTM on top of x86-based (32-bit) Windows 7, users need to have at least 750 MB of free disk space.
> 
> Obviously, a little more is required for x64-based (64-bit) Windows 7 SP1 RTM, namely no less than 1050 MB.
> 
> Getting SP1 RTM from the Microsoft Download Center and installing it requires at least 4100 MB of free disk space for the x86-based (32-bit) version of the service pack, and as much as 7400 MB for the x64-based (64-bit) flavor.


Check SP1 installation log - you have DIFFERENT problem!


----------



## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Here's what I get:


----------



## wingrider01 (Sep 9, 2005)

smiddy said:


> Whoa, we need to talk then. I purchased a new drive already, Crucial SSD 128GB 410 MB/s read...
> 
> The user directory and the program directories, if I could move those that would be a couple of GB. Can you point me to directions on how to do this, there are some environment variables that need to change and I'm sure there are some registry entries too.


here is one link on how to do it, I did it on a fresh install with a dummy user that I never touched since

http://www.windows7hacker.com/index...e-user-profile-default-location-in-windows-7/


----------



## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

smiddy said:


> Here's what I get:


I would contact M$ support - that is ridiculous message against official requirements !


----------



## wilbur_the_goose (Aug 16, 2006)

This is the 25 year IT guy in me speaking, but I'd consider doing a clean install of Windows on a bigger drive.


----------



## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

wilbur_the_goose said:


> This is the 25 year IT guy in me speaking, but I'd consider doing a clean install of Windows on a bigger drive.


That would be home user speaking, not IT person with one year in a field .

As IT person, who is usually responsible for many computers, he doesn't have a luxury to do what you proposed, especially talking about SSD. Nay.

He would make all effort to make it work as the M$ intend within written limitations. He will start investigate a root cause by himself and would escalate up to higher level if can't solve it.


----------

