Is pagefile.sys necessary?

[Delirious]

My specs
AMD XP 3200+ 2.2GHz
Ati Radeon x1600pro 512mb AGP (Soon to be Ati HD3850 512mb AGP)
2GB DDR RAM
200GB HDD

I am reading through various sites and I'm getting mixed feedback. Would the pagefile.sys file be necessary to me? If so how large should I set it to be? (like 1x, 1.5x, 2x my ram?) If not how may I go about deleting it or making it smaller?

 

[Pupik]

I should warn you, my habits and computer skills are firmly rooted in pre-2003 information, but...

I'm still in the old-school habit of making the paging file 2x the size of the RAM, and fixing it to that size as a minimum and maximum (for Win95 → XP). It's not something I notice a difference until I've been playing around with Photoshop for 3 hours, for example.

You can't easily delete the paging file, although I think there's software out there that will defrag it. You could set Virtual Memory to zero, restart, then re-set it, and restart again. I used to do that when I had a 2GB hard drive, just to get every last byte.

Yeah, I used to be quite cheap and stingy sometimes. It's not like spending $200 extra for a 6GB (back in the day) was good investment advice.

 

[the Interceptor]

Yes, you need the pagefile.sys. It's where your computer dumps data when the RAM is filled up. You can switch it off, but your computer will likely stop working proplerly. The size depends. I guess 2 x RAM fixed size will do.