Could someone please explain why it's bad to disable paging?

[none]

Several people on this forum say that disabling your paging file is bad practice. Well, naturally if you have 256MB of RAM, you don't disable your paging file. But if you have 1024MB, or more, what is the problem?

I find systems without a paging file far more responsive. Your RAM is a wackload faster than your hard drive, after all.
I am taking a LOT of work off the drive, which logically leads to less wear & tear and better life expectancy.
Talking of less load, the system runs a LOT cooler and quieter, since a busy hard drive is usually one of the biggest offenders in those areas.
I even get a little more space on the hard drive, kind of a bonus.

So what are the problems with running no paging file?

[lfeagan]

On Windows, largely because of its extremely poor page replacement algorithms, I would generally say that disabling the paging file wouldn't be the end of the world. Another good thing you can do is to disable all services you don't need and set the registry value to disable executive paging. Executive paging = paging out portions of the OS to disk. This can also have very nice performance benefits, esp. for servers. There are a ton of tweaks...google for them to find out lots more info than I am willing to type here. A good OS shouldn't hitup the page file until it really needs to...but Windows seems to think its time to page out stuff when it still has <insert large number, such as 0.5G> of RAM free. No idea why on earth it does this. Linux is far more intelligent about its page file usage and I give it 512MB of hard disk "just in case" I start hogging RAM building some spatial data structure or some other garbage that is huge.

[none]

... and set the registry value to disable executive paging. ...

That registry talk actually reminded me of something I was pondering... Windows still pages 2MB even if the virtual memory is turning off completely... And if you don't let it do that, it goes completely heywire.
I wonder if disabling the paging executive (or doing something else) would make it give up those 2MB peacefully.. This is really curiousity speaking. I can leave with a measly 2MB page file

[ZPrime]

This doesn't belong in the T-series forum, why didn't you post it in the Windows questions section?

That said, read the links in this post. If you're still intrigued after reading them, get a free account at ArsTechnica and search the forums for anything posted by DriverGuru.

If you STILL want more, go buy "Inside Windows 2000" from MS Press and get your head into the really nitty-gritty discussion.

Suffice to say that it is not a good idea to disable paging. Disabling paging is going to SLOW DOWN your machine, unless you happen to be lucky enough to keep the working set of all running programs smaller than the amount of ram you have... but if you're doing this, you're probably quitting things once you are done with them, which is also an inefficent use of the machine. Multitask, people!