For years, Windows tweaking people have tried to convince everybody that if you disable the pagefile, you'll get a big performance boost. One of our readers did a ton of testing to prove that this is not true.

Reader Eric did comprehensive testing using various test suites, boot and shutdown, and other testing to see whether disabling the page file break your system or give a performance boost.

Conclusions:

  • You can run Windows without a pagefile if you have enough RAM.
  • There's pretty much zero benefit to disabling the pagefile.

You should definitely check out the full (very long) article for all the details.

The Windows 7 Pagefile And Running Without One [TweakHound]