FINALLY someone who is human and I can talk to in plain English. Where were you all my computer life???
Fixing computers lol
I read the same things you did about the page file. And honestly what it comes down to, as what most things do, is the current setup and situation. Every machine is different with a unlimited amount of variables. What works for one may not work for another. This is true for everything across the board in Windows. There is ALWAYS more than one option.
The page file is old tech, it was made because systems years and years ago didn't have that much memory and memory was expensive! I remember when it was around $3 per MB of memory. (Mid 90's I think)
So the page file was made and used, memory got filled up or Windows needed to make room in memory it moved it to the page file, which is the virtual memory. Now it could handle as much as it needed. But the draw back is the page file runs off of the hard drive, which is normally one of the slowest components in the system. After all todays memory can do 10+ GB a second. Normally hard drives can do maybe 100 MB/s and thats on one large file. SSD drives have made this way, way better but again, still no close to the speeds in memory itself.
So Since I dont have any problem at all of running out of memory I turn the page file off. I never have trouble on my system and all the programs and games I use never have a problem. Mainly because there isnt very many programs out there that require anything with a page file.
Some people freak out thinking, "You have to have a page file, its there for a reason!" but at the same time, if Windows had to have one, they wouldn't give you the option of turning it off.
I am on a 64 BIt system so it can access and use all the memory I have. If a user was on 32 Bit I dont think they would be able to handle as much without a page file because of the 3GB memory limit of 32bit. So even if you had 32 GB of ram Windows 32bit could only use 3GB of it. But 64bit its limit is into the Terabytes, so not really a problem and why you wont see any kind of 128bit any time soon lol
64 bit was only made to get over that 3GB limit.
Also, to be honest, my system is faster having it off. Because even though you still have tons of memory Windows will still move memory to the page file that it thinks is old and hasn't been used in a while. So no matter what you have that page file on the drive, and it can be BIG, so now you have a little slow down waiting for Windows to finish reading or writing to it.
Ever since I turned mine off my system has been WAY snappier and faster to respond, and programs load faster. Not because of the page file itself, but because the page file runs off the hard drive
Shane
