From my personal experience I’ve noticed that disabling the page file in Windows XP has given me, in general, the most speed gain out of any other software change I can make. Obviously this has to be done when a significant amount of RAM is available. Typically I find that it works nicely with +2GB of RAM. The only issues I’ve ever really had were loading up Adobe Photoshop.
Is this really a speed improvement or am I imagining it?
Note: In order to actually turn it off, you must not just set it to 0MB, but disable it. Otherwise Windows will just expand it when it needs to in order to meet its needs.
Solution:
Windows XP flushes minimized applications to disk like crazy.. try it yourself, start downloading a large torrent and minimize everything. Pretty soon almost all of your RAM is used as file cache for the torrent instead of your other applications. Disabling the page file will prevent this behavior.
In Windows Vista and Windows 7 though, the system handles this scenario much, much better.. so I’m not sure disabling the page file in these versions will do much of a difference.
Some games require you to have a page file even when it’s not really needed, I noticed this recently when trying to play a game demo I downloaded from Steam. Even though I had 6 gigs of RAM available the game refused to start until I created a tiny, tiny page file.. sigh
Personally, when I have plenty of RAM, I prefer to go without a paging file.