G+: Ah Windows

David Coles
Ah Windows. Thanks for filling up 1/4 of my SSD with hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys.
I can sort of understand having swap on SSD (though I think I've got enough RAM for the time being), I see very little use for hibernation being there especially when I never use the feature.

Mat Bettinson
So just turn it off :-) You can turn the page file off pretty easily too. Or move it to a spinny disk.

David Coles
The solution for me was to put swap onto the HDD (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2160852) and turn of hibernation (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730).

Mat Bettinson
You young fellas... This is stuff we learned on win95 /old.

David Coles
Oh I've messed with swap before, just never had to disable hibernation. These days I'm mainly on Unix boxes and so only jump on Windows for my gaming fix. I'm at least old enough to remember using a computer in the days before Windows existed. :)

Also glad to also see http://windirstat.info/ works just as well as it did on Windows XP.

Mat Bettinson
Cor really? Fair enough :) Small ssds do kinda make you worry about these big files eh.

Actually I had to do something pretty weird this morning, switch a Windows box to using AHCI instead of IDE mode so I could flash an SSD firmware. Naturally Windows didn't want to play ball... needed registry hacking in the end.

David Coles
Indeed. I was trying to find a graph of Memory vs. Disk Space to see if there were other points where disk space didn't completely dwarf system memory. Roughly speaking, since 2005 I'd say my computer's memory has gone up by 16-32x and disk space by 10-20x but an affordable SSD has about the same capacity as my HDD did back in 2005.

I'm surprised that AHCI isn't the default these days. It's nice being able to hotswap my eSATA HDD. Why Windows doesn't just set up both drivers, like it does in the PE, boggles the mind.

Mat Bettinson
What it actually does is disable the AHCI drivers if the machine was installed with the drives in IDE mode. So what you need to do is renenable them. Then it's all groovy...