Page File Reduction?

The pagefile doesn't need to be 12 GB. It might need to be 12 GB at some point in time, but it's silly and absolutely ridiculous to have it constantly eating up 12 GB of your SSD space just in case that once in a decade event ever happens.

Right-click Computer (Win7) or My PC (Win8).
Click Properties.
Click Advanced system settings.
Under Performance, click Settings.
Click the Advanced tab.
Under Virtual Memory, click Change.

The pagefile is probably set to system managed. That's Microsoft-speak for "No management, just make it the same size as the amount of RAM you have."

Change it to custom size. Set the initial size to something like 512 MB. If you actually come close to using up all 12 GB of RAM fairly frequently, then you may wish to set this to 2 or 4 GB.

Set the maximium size to 12 GB.

Your pagefile will now start at 512 MB, and will only grow to 12 GB if the system actually needs to swap out memory. If you never come close to using up all 12 GB of RAM, the pagefile will never grow bigger than 512 MB.

Do not pick "no paging file." That can cause your system to hang. The option is there for if you have multiple drives. Also, don't make the initial pagefile size much smaller than 512 MB. You can go lower, I've heard to as little as 128 MB, but Windows wants to swap some stuff to disk even if you're not using all your RAM. So if you go too small, Windows will just make it bigger.

Edit: Other space-saving tips are:

- Reduce the amount of system restore points. Right-click Computer -> Properties -> System Protection -> Configure -> Move the slider until you've limited System Restore to about 5-10 GB.

- Delete the uninstall images for Windows Updates. Windows key + E -> right-click the C: drive -> Properties -> Disk Cleanup -> Clean System Files. Depending on which version of Windows you're running, this usually frees up about 2-7 GB of space. I've heard of it recovering as much as 17 GB (Win 7 with SP1 and SP2 manually installed). Be absolutely sure your system is stable with the updates it has before you do this though. If an update broke your computer and you do this, there's no way to uninstall the update.

Edit edit: You're aware that you need to keep about 15% free space on the SSD in order to maintain write speeds? As long as you maintain that, you won't run the risk of the computer needing to grow the pagefile to 12GB, and there not being enough space on the SSD.