pagefile.sys appeared and then disappeared out of nowhere?

[VLcKo23]

Hello, long story short:
- bought new rams, new HDD (still have SSD and old HDD)
- I upgraded to windows 10, had BSOD: this destroyed the windows's performance
- rolled back to 7, guess what? Windows copy not genuine for some reason, can't contact the guy who repaired my PC (as he also installed and activated the windows and has the activation key) so i'm stuck with illegal windows for now
- worked fine tho, until my SSD C: drive started filling up, searched up on the matter, downloaded WinDirStat, found out pagefile.sys taking up about 24 gigs, that's THE SIZE OF MY RAM by the way, searched up on that as well, found out it's what windows uses if i dont have enough ram... (the heck?)
- filled up my SSD up to 4 gigs left (i gradually deleted files as it filled it up) then stopped, searched for viruses, malwares, spywares (have eset licensed, spybot free, did both scans)
- did disk check if there's something wrong with the disk or something corrupted, after restart, the pagefile.sys was gone... like, what?

What do I do now? Does anyone know what caused the pagefile.sys be 24 gigs big even if i have 24 gigs of RAM? Should I just clean install windows?

hardware:
Amd FX 8300 3.3 ghz
MSI 970 gaming mobo
MSI gtx 960
Kingston SSD 120 gb
some 7 years old HDD i dont remember(reason of new HDD)
WD Blue 2T HDD
8GB kit hyperx fury 1600 mhz RAM
16GB kit hyperx fury 1600 mhz RAM
(dual-channel)
(fairly old)Corsair CX600 PSU

Windows version:
Windows 7 professional plus 64 bit

 

[johnbl]

a pagefile is used to copy the contents of the RAM to the harddrive so it can be loaded directly into memory at a later time.
it would be normal for the pagefile to be the size of your ram, or 1.5 times the size of the RAM was a normal recommendation at one time.
(windows 7) You can set the pagefile to be much smaller if you need to save space.

also, the pagefile.sys is normally a hidden system file, if you deleted it and created another one you would have to unhide it again.

you can start cmd.exe as an admin (windows key+x then A)
then type
cd:\
attrib pagefile.sys

this will show the flags for the file.
in my case the System flag and the hidden flag are set.

 

[VLcKo23]

a pagefile is used to copy the contents of the RAM to the harddrive so it can be loaded directly into memory at a later time.
it would be normal for the pagefile to be the size of your ram, or 1.5 times the size of the RAM was a normal recommendation at one time.
(windows 7) You can set the pagefile to be much smaller if you need to save space.

also, the pagefile.sys is normally a hidden system file, if you deleted it and created another one you would have to unhide it again.

you can start cmd.exe as an admin (windows key+x then A)
then type
cd:\
attrib pagefile.sys

this will show the flags for the file.
in my case the System flag and the hidden flag are set.

Actually, I didn't delete the file, it just disappeared/ deleted itself, i did not touch it.
the CMD.EXE way didn't find the file, or any path to the file, maybe i wrote it the wrong way?
another thing, I viewed it through the WinDirStat program which checks disk and shows all the files and how much % they take from the HDD space. I'm just wondering how could something like that happen that the file clearly wasnt there, cuz i had 25 gigs of space free on my C: drive, the out of nowhere I had mere 700mb free, noticed pagefile.sys being a big as hell, then it disappears and I have 25 gigs of space free again...

But what I wanna know is whether I need the file, or how do I create it if I need it...

 

[johnbl]

you can also run cleanmgr.exe to clean up some of the system used space on the drive.
there are also some dism.exe commands that will remove old software updates from your machine.
(remove superseeded updates) https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj963514(v=winembedded.81).aspx

hit control + alt+del to bring up task manager select the performance tab, select the memory item.
at the bottom of the page will be the in use memory and available. I would expect that you have lots of free memory if you have 24 GB RAM. I would reduce your virtual memory settings to 100Mb to maybe 2 GB pagefile.
if you set it to zero, windows will just take a part of your ram and use it for paging space and certain programs might fail.
Also you might not get a memory dump in certain if your system bugchecks.

I have run with zero pagefile before, I never did find any program that failed but some poorly written program may fail.
(something that uses a lot of virtual memory like photoshop or movie editing software maybe)

a pagefile is used to copy the contents of the RAM to the harddrive so it can be loaded directly into memory at a later time.
it would be normal for the pagefile to be the size of your ram, or 1.5 times the size of the RAM was a normal recommendation at one time.
(windows 7) You can set the pagefile to be much smaller if you need to save space.

also, the pagefile.sys is normally a hidden system file, if you deleted it and created another one you would have to unhide it again.

you can start cmd.exe as an admin (windows key+x then A)
then type
cd:\
attrib pagefile.sys

this will show the flags for the file.
in my case the System flag and the hidden flag are set.

Actually, I didn't delete the file, it just disappeared/ deleted itself, i did not touch it.
the CMD.EXE way didn't find the file, or any path to the file, maybe i wrote it the wrong way?
another thing, I viewed it through the WinDirStat program which checks disk and shows all the files and how much % they take from the HDD space. I'm just wondering how could something like that happen that the file clearly wasnt there, cuz i had 25 gigs of space free on my C: drive, the out of nowhere I had mere 700mb free, noticed pagefile.sys being a big as hell, then it disappears and I have 25 gigs of space free again...

But what I wanna know is whether I need the file, or how do I create it if I need it...

 

[VLcKo23]

you can also run cleanmgr.exe to clean up some of the system used space on the drive.
there are also some dism.exe commands that will remove old software updates from your machine.
(remove superseeded updates) https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj963514(v=winembedded.81).aspx

hit control + alt+del to bring up task manager select the performance tab, select the memory item.
at the bottom of the page will be the in use memory and available. I would expect that you have lots of free memory if you have 24 GB RAM. I would reduce your virtual memory settings to 100Mb to maybe 2 GB pagefile.
if you set it to zero, windows will just take a part of your ram and use it for paging space and certain programs might fail.
Also you might not get a memory dump in certain if your system bugchecks.

I have run with zero pagefile before, I never did find any program that failed but some poorly written program may fail.
(something that uses a lot of virtual memory like photoshop or movie editing software maybe)

a pagefile is used to copy the contents of the RAM to the harddrive so it can be loaded directly into memory at a later time.
it would be normal for the pagefile to be the size of your ram, or 1.5 times the size of the RAM was a normal recommendation at one time.
(windows 7) You can set the pagefile to be much smaller if you need to save space.

also, the pagefile.sys is normally a hidden system file, if you deleted it and created another one you would have to unhide it again.

you can start cmd.exe as an admin (windows key+x then A)
then type
cd:\
attrib pagefile.sys

this will show the flags for the file.
in my case the System flag and the hidden flag are set.

Actually, I didn't delete the file, it just disappeared/ deleted itself, i did not touch it.
the CMD.EXE way didn't find the file, or any path to the file, maybe i wrote it the wrong way?
another thing, I viewed it through the WinDirStat program which checks disk and shows all the files and how much % they take from the HDD space. I'm just wondering how could something like that happen that the file clearly wasnt there, cuz i had 25 gigs of space free on my C: drive, the out of nowhere I had mere 700mb free, noticed pagefile.sys being a big as hell, then it disappears and I have 25 gigs of space free again...

But what I wanna know is whether I need the file, or how do I create it if I need it...

Thanks to you I actually found out what happened with my pagefile.sys, It was moved to another hard drive, I found it on E: even though I did not move it, windows must have somehow, thanks for the help .