What happens when Windows 7 system runs out of physical AND pagefile memory?

I've read a tons of articles about whether to disable or not to disable PageFile in Windows. For example: http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

The point to not to do it is usually, that if it is disabled and system runs out of RAM, it wil crash.

Ok, but what happens when the pagefile is enabled, but system runs out of RAM AND pagefile is also full. Will it also crash?

So is there any difference between (Windows 7 64-bit)

8 GB RAM, pagefile disabled

and

4 GB RAM, 4 GB pagefile

? Will one crash and the other won't if full?

Well, I mean from the operating system point of view. Not the difference that one is using a harddrive (slower) and the other one not.


The result is unpredictable, but it will be preceded by extreme lagging and/or freezing (they are different). An 8GB RAM system with no pagefile is what I used to run and would like to run, but M$ ISOs on their dreamspark state like to unpack into RAM, which makes for a problem when you download something like SQL Sever and you're using 5GB of RAM because you multitask, but I digress.

More Info

Page file disabling is typically user discretion, not to mention the article you cite is 3 years old. Three years ago I wouldn't have just disabled it, not even made it smaller. But now, with machines with +8GB of RAM I definitely turn it off. Some people recommend a page file size of 1.5x-2x the amount of RAM in the machine, but if you want a single file that generally will not be used taking up 12-16GB, go for it. If you do that much multitasking where you require a page file that size, then you probably would not want the slowness that comes with paging.