Page file in vista taking up harddrive space?

Your computer has a dedicated amount of memory to run certain programs. Your pagefile specifies the amount of harddrive space to use in case your RAM isn't enough to cover whatever is running on your computer. I typically don't let the computer decide what it should set aside as it seems that everytime i boot up my computer some of my harddrive space gets used up ( this I have yet to figure out). In any case to manually set your pagefile go to start--->right click on computer ---->properties------->advanced system settings----->under "performance" hit "settings"----->advanced tab---->again hit the advanced tab----->under "virtual memory" hit change--->uncheck "automatically set paging file size---->and check custom size.

As a rule of thumb always set the intial to higher than what your actual RAM is, so if you have say 900 MB RAM a good amount to set is say 1025 MB RAM ( a gig or so). For your maximum set it at 1.5 times the amount of RAM you physically have. so for our exampl her, if you have 900MB RAM your max should be set to about 1350 MB RAM. Using this method you should have set a good paging file size and your hardrive space shouldn't decrease. Also turning off system restore seems to help too.