[unfasten]

> If you have RAM free, Windows shouldn't be using your page file

http://serverfault.com/questions/23621/any-benefit-or-detrim...

    Many people seem to assume that Windows pushes data into the pagefile on
    demand. EG: something wants a lot of memory, and there is not enough RAM to
    fill the need, so Windows begins madly writing data from RAM to disk at this
    last minute, so that it can free up RAM for the new demands.

    This is incorrect. There's more going on under the hood. Generally speaking,
    Windows maintains a backing store, meaning that it wants to see everything
    that's in memory also on the disk somewhere. Now, when something comes along
    and demands a lot of memory, Windows can clear RAM very quickly, because
    that data is already on disk, ready to be paged back into RAM if it is
    called for. So it can be said that much of what's in pagefile is also in
    RAM; the data was preemptively placed in pagefile to speed up new memory
    allocation demands.

And this is another good reason to have at least a token pagefile. Without any virtual memory all the memory a program requests gets allocated right away.

    Removing pagefile entirely can cause more disk thrashing. Imagine a simple
    scenario where some app launches and demands 80% of existing RAM. This would
    force current executable code out of RAM - possibly even OS code.

There are references for more detailed reading listed in the provided link.

edit: I also do the same thing as yareally with my pagefile, though I have much less RAM than him.