OK guys, this will be a debate for time to come. Here is my 2 cents.
The pagefile, while not necessary with over 512MB of RAM on certain XP machines, increases system stabilty. Think about it if you are running a demanding game, it is gonna chew up your RAM and you will definately get a BSOD. Just try it and you will find out. Also the way windows uses the pagfile will increase system performance. It puts only seldom used data or rarely used system data into it. Setting the page file is your preference. Yes we are not talking about a server. Some webservers I run at work have the pagefile set to over 10GB. The general rule of thumb should be 1.5 times your RAM. You should also configure it to a set size to reduce fragmentation. I.E. for you set it to 768 to 768. Setting the Pagefile to another drive or even partition seperated from the windows installation partition is known to increase performance. Damn, can't I type a short reply.
Putting it on a different partition on the same drive does almost nothing for performance. The only way to increase performance is to move the file to a separate drive altogether.
OK guys, this will be a debate for time to come. Here is my 2 cents.
The pagefile, while not necessary with over 512MB of RAM on certain XP machines, increases system stabilty. Think about it if you are running a demanding game, it is gonna chew up your RAM and you will definately get a BSOD. Just try it and you will find out. Also the way windows uses the pagfile will increase system performance. It puts only seldom used data or rarely used system data into it. Setting the page file is your preference. Yes we are not talking about a server. Some webservers I run at work have the pagefile set to over 10GB. The general rule of thumb should be 1.5 times your RAM. You should also configure it to a set size to reduce fragmentation. I.E. for you set it to 768 to 768. Setting the Pagefile to another drive or even partition seperated from the windows installation partition is known to increase performance. Damn, can't I type a short reply.
Why 768? If you say 1.5 times the size of your ram, shouldn't i have it set to 4500 gig as i have 3gig of Ram. Currently i have it set to 1gig to 2 gig?
Do not follow this advice. If Windows runs out of memory and you do not have a swap file set up you will crash the OS. Always have a swap file set up and it should typically be 1.5 to 2 times the amount of physical memory you have installed. If you have tons of disk space, set the size of your swap file to some small amount, defrag completely, then set the swap file size to maximum (and then don't worry about it again).
As the old adage goes, better to have and not need than need and not have.
Just to let everyone know that I have set it to 1000MB (1Gig) and a max of 2000mb (2gig).
So far no worries or hassles. I am due for a format soon, (I always like to start clean from time to time) and seeing as I have done so Hardware mods I think a format will let windows set it self for that hardware.
Remember we have to tell windows what we want and what to do!
you should have turned the page file as pscowbody had advised. if you have more then 1GB of ram you don't need page file and your pc will run much faster
@HeartView you are way off and wrong, in 4 years with a p4 2.0 and 1Gb of ram there has been no problems, your advice is one of a person who is just repeating and not speaking from actual experience if it was then you would never say that.
actually I'm a software tester and run multiple apps, obviously you have no idea what you are talking about.
if running fah (folding@home) encoding media, opera with 40 tabs open, anti virus, firewall, spysweeper plus the apps I'm testing at the time don't count as multiple applications then I don't know what does, shoot, fah alone is a heavy process on its own.
But you're hardly using any memory. You have nearly 500 MB free with your "many apps" open. My development language alone can eat up 350 MB or more of memory. Point is you are NOT using memory even close to your 1GB limit so of course you aren't running into any problems.
well if my p2p, my CPU is at 100% in the pic, I got photo shop with the huge texture open, opera open, paint open, fah open, plus the normal apps like anti virus, firewall anti spyware and etc.
that is more then any normal user would have running, so I'm not sure what you want me to do here but the PC is not crashing and I'm not running out memory.
what language development software? tell me so I can run that for you also, nothing is gonna make you happy anyways apparently facts don't play any part, but I got time so I'll play your game so what you got?
Myth - "Disabling the Paging File improves performance."
Reality - "You gain no performance improvement by turning off the Paging File. When certain applications start, they allocate a huge amount of memory (hundreds of megabytes typically set aside in virtual memory) even though they might not use it. If no paging file (pagefile.sys) is present, a memory-hogging application can quickly use a large chunk of RAM. Even worse, just a few such programs can bring a machine loaded with memory to a halt. Some applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) will display warnings on startup if no paging file is present." - Source
"In modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly. All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer. In the default Windows OS configuration, 2 GB of this virtual address space are designated for each process' private use and the other 2 GB are shared between all processes and the operating system. RAM is a limited resource, whereas virtual memory is, for most practical purposes, unlimited. There can be a large number of processes each with its own 2 GB of private virtual address space. When the memory in use by all the existing processes exceeds the amount of RAM available, the operating system will move pages (4 KB pieces) of one or more virtual address spaces to the computer's hard disk, thus freeing that RAM frame for other uses. In Windows systems, these "paged out" pages are stored in one or more files called pagefile.sys in the root of a partition. Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system."
its not a myth, do it and see for yourself, writing to straight to ram instead of to hdd then to ram is faster.
any body can figure that out
but don't take my word for it, do it yourself, use your pc with page file disabled for a week then enable it again and if your pc does not seems like a turtule to you then come back and I will change my name to what ever you like.
I forgot ftp and p2p usage also. 
