Yes, it's acceptable to lower virtual RAM if needed.
Yes, it's acceptable to lower virtual RAM if needed.
It's best to avoid messing around with the page file, particularly reducing its size. A 16GB drive isn't as large as it appears because I often see titles like WZ and MSFS reaching the 10GB threshold without other applications open in Task Manager (I also keep it at 32 for that reason).
It rather depends, ideally you want it to be able to page out as much of your RAM as possible in an emergency to avoid a crash. It doesn't hurt to have too large a pagefile, but it does hurt to have too small.
The suggested amount is quite low; your system already utilizes 9GB of the pagefile. I frequently exceed 32GB, so for a temporary solution I've configured a maximum of 256GB on my HDD until more RAM is available. A quick point: does the choice between SSD and HDD affect the pagefile?
It will be significantly slower on an HDD, increasing the chance of your OS freezing or lagging when accessing it.
I understand. Additional investigation suggests similar concerns, though some users believe slower speeds are beneficial because they extend SSD durability. This might be more relevant if files and the pagefile are stored together. The impact on lifespan could vary, but using a large SSD for just the pagefile may not be ideal. You might consider purchasing a 256-500GB M.2 drive solely for pagefile use, given your RAM constraints.
The page file was expanded to 9791 MB because some programs needed more ram than what you had physical in your machine, and Windows had to move some less used data from RAM to the page file. If it's configured as dynamic size and there's enough free space on that drive, Windows won't bother to shrink the file even though at this moment there may be only 500 MB or 1 GB of actual paged content in the page file. Manually forcing it to a smaller size will just cause more writes because the operating system would have to clean that file more often, removing no longer needed paged stuff to make room for other stuff. On a mechanical hard drive, it would make sense to have that page file as a fixed size file and at a reasonably large size (recommended 1.5x-2x the actual ram amount). Fixed page files can be defragmented and moved to the start of a mechanical drive, where you have the lowest access times (the drive read/write heads have to move less, and the data tracks get read much faster, because the sectors move faster under the read/write heads). With SSDs, this is no longer any issue, wherever the data is physically located doesn't matter, all the flash chips are read at the same speed and same access time.