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]

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Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work.
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