[quote name='Sirisian' timestamp='1314667624' post='4855277']
Your best bet is to buy more RAM then turn off the page file. It's a worthless ancient feature in operating systems that people falsely think windows handles correctly. It doesn't and virtual memory for all intents and purposes isn't needed nowadays. I have 16 GB in my laptop and with From Dust (random game on Steam) and tons of other programs open I'm at 3.57 GB. Windows 7 likes to shift HD stuff into RAM if you have a lot of it making things faster.
My own experience doesn't really back this up. I often run lots of memory intensive programs such as Sibelius (with additional samplers all with huge things stored in RAM), Eclipse etc. all while rendering some huge thing in Blender. I have 4 GB of RAM, and things do page in and out but I rarely notice any lag. If on the other hand I disable virtual memory I'll start to get warning messages very quickly followed shortly by programs dying in horrible ways. Windows virtual memory is certainly a bit idiosyncratic and I think with some configurations it does more harm than good, but I'm not convinced that saying it's worthless or not correct is really accurate.
[/quote]
It is useful if you need to run something and don't have the physical memory for it. Thats it. When you do have enough, it actually seems to slow everything down. As for not seeing lag, try running those things with 2gb instead of 4 on a laptop with a slow hdd. You will soon realise how applications paging in and out constantly can result in a loss of productivity.
