Eliminating the Page File

Solution 1:

The pagefile is used for a few other things that may be handy. For example, it is used for crash dumps if Windows crashes. So troubleshooting errors may become a lot harder. Also, some applications depend on the existence of a pagefile.

The real question is why wouldn't you have a pagefile? Can't you afford the few GB of disk space it takes up? As long as you let Windows manage the pagefile size, performance will be the same. It simply won't use the pagefile during general use.

Solution 2:

There is an interesting article on Tom's Hardware:

Does No Swap File Equal Better Performance?

[...] Again, we conducted this test with RAM sizes ranging from 8 GB to 512 MB. While working without a paging file was possible without any problems with 8 GB, the situation quickly became critical with less memory installed.

With 8 GB and no swap file, the system was fine. Even in some memory intensive scenarios such as opening files in Photoshop CS3 with a total file size of 3 GB, the system remained very responsive and even snappy, never writing to disk once.

Note: Microsoft does not recommend setting the paging file below 400 MB:

Solution 3:

If you don't run out of RAM, you'll be fine without a page file. With 8GB, it's unlikely that you'll run out of physical memory. If you do, however, things will quickly go down hill. Instead of your computer slowing down (as it's paging to disk), you'll get random app crashes (as malloc fails).

Without a page file, Windows will also be unable to eject program memory to disk in favor of things like file caches. Whether this makes a difference or not would depend on how you use your PC.

All in all, I don't think you'd see any improvement in overall use - but the downside is pretty minimal as well (since you have 8GB).