Odd, but effective, Windows Fix

Back in the days of 16-bit Windows, we had this thing called cooperative multitasking. It sucked. It meant that a single unresponsive application could potentially lock up the entire system, and you'd lose all apps. Now, we have preemptive multitasking. The OS calls the shots. Without a page file, we'd be back into a similar situation re memory: a single app could consume most of the system, and all other apps would fail on allocation - and most apps are not written to be stable in the face of allocation failures. It's either that, or background apps would need to be suspended or killed arbitrarily by the OS, or some other kind of drastic limitations on productive work.

I have 16GB of memory in my system; but I regularly run utilities that consume a large fraction of that (enough that the 12GB in my previous system was starting to look pokey - and my prior system with 8GB IIRC, I had to run utilities sequentially instead of in parallel to avoid page thrashing). The advantage of having lots of memory is that you can write utilities that build massive in-memory data structures. Problems are way easier to solve when you can rely on being able to stuff everything into a big hash table, rather than worry about temporary files on disk, or god forbid faffing around with a database and losing orders of magnitude of performance.

Page files, even in the presence of large amounts of RAM, are what enable this approach on workstations, in two ways: it means you won't suffer an app crashing from out of memory as you skirt the line of maximum physical memory; and secondly, and probably more importantly, page files backing allocated pages means the OS is able to free up memory sooner for those applications that demand it.

If you use your computer for casual use and don't stress it or do much critical work with it (i.e. use it much like you would a phone or tablet), you can get by just fine without a page file. But if you actually want to use the thing, a page file is a very handy thing to have.

powercfg /change disk-timeout-ac 0

There are many reasons to have a paging file even if you have plenty of ram. If you get a bluescreen it has to use the paging file for the memory dump if you want one, etc.