Is it safe to disable paging file with 4GB RAM in XP 32Bit

What about mapping the paging file to a USB jump drive? It is faster than hitting the HD.

USB drives are slower in megabytes per second then the hard drive but faster for seek times.

Thanks all for the input.
hmm, i will try it today to see if i get any crashes in the games i most oftenly play, if i don't get any problem then i will keep it.
another thing i wanna ask that i have 2 hdd's in my pc, 1 hdd contains the OS and the other hdd contains games only (so hdd reading should be a bit fast) so will it make any difference in games if i move my page file to the other hdd that contain games?

Like sugessted above, I wouldn't totaly disable the paging file. you could minimize it to 256MB or less. I still think you might find that things won't go so well if you completely disable the file. I guess the usb drive idea might work, at 480Mbps it is fast. though I'm not to sure what the results might be.

usb has hi cpu uses maybe if you had a firewire key or a CF / flash drive on a ide / sata bus.

I run 2003 with 8gb ram. I disabled my pagefile and noticed a small increase in speed for 90% of my system. When I start to do SQL database stuff.. Then I start to get problems...

I wouldnt recommend it for only 4.. (or 3.2 as you get in 32 bit)

That USB idea sure sounds cool. Does anyone has a personal experience of doing that?
I just played The Sims 2 and TES IV Oblivion for nearly 3 hours with paging off without any problem but this is not enough for testing i think.
@bombasschi cken
My rig is solely for gaming, no SQL database stuff or other programming/graphics designing etc here.

Was there a noticable performance boost?

Also usb is 480 megabits per second so 480 / 8 to get megabytes. thats 60 megabytes/sec. and the overhead of usb tends to push it down into the 40's or lower, its the access times that may help...

If you got lots of money to blow, get a gigabyte Iram and 4 x 1 gig sticks of DDR(yes DDR1, thats what it takes)and page on that thing. 150 megs/sec(since its limited to its sata1 interface.) and 0.1ms(if i remember 1 right) access times.

I may have to try turning it off to see what difference, if any, it makes.

I disabled the paging file. When I looked in Task Manager XP was still paging, go figure.

UMM... I might be missing something but why is there a chart Next to that meter that reads "Page File Usage History" that seems to make a graph based on that meter. I always assumed that that showed Page file Usage

As for Zorg you have to make sure to apply the changes and reboot, although that doesn't seem to always stop windows from paging. It seems to have its own ideas about how much page file it needs

page file is basically a fallback option for your computer. how ever microsoft have built windows to page all data that isnt in high demand.

turning page file off will improve system performance but if it does run out of memory. your computer will freeze or BSOD.
this could cause some file corruptions on your system(very rare)

for you simply gaming with xp and 4gb of ram. you should be fine (thier is a way to get the full 4 gb on a 32bit system google it i cant remember how to do it)

In terms of gaming and running single applications of any kind, you will not get any performance boost by disabling the page file. Hard drive accesses that occur while you are running a single application are simply the application loading from the hard drive installation (assuming you have enough ram). If your computer is accessing the page file while you are running a single application, is means you need more ram and if you disable the page file in this case, your computer will crash. Disabling the page file will help performance if you are running more than one application at a time especially if the applications are running for a long time, or not being used often. If you wish to increase the loading performance of games, then you should consider buying a high speed solid state hard drive (expensive).

I have been running XP with 3GB ram on two computers with the pagefile disabled for years. It has caused no problems with memory-hungry MS Office, with memory-hungry games -- in their day -- like Battlefield, etc. In watching my memory usage, I have never seen the pagefile go higher than 1.8GB, so 3GB allows a significant amount of headroom.

One of the commenters above suggested that some applications will throw out a warning message if such app finds that a pagefile is not present. The only application I know of that does that is Photoshop, which you specifically noted you don't use.

I say go for it. It's really nice to not have my hard drive clicking up a storm for no reason -- it preserves the hard drive life. Additionally, switching between windows is much faster with all of the windows in RAM rather than having some stored in the pagefile.

I personally don't even bother with closing the background apps. 3.24GBs of memory is an insane amount for XP and the RAM doesn't work noticeably slower when it has 2Gigs of data on it vs none. In essence -- it's not very time-consuming for the RAM to find somewhere to stuff your data.

There's a setting in 32 bit windows that allows for any amount of memory to work. If I'm not mistaken, it's called P.A.E. Go check it out, & see if I'm right. I hope I am.