I just let Windows manage it anymore. It's true that it used to be the norm to set it to 1.5x your physical RAM and set that as both the minimum and maximum to prevent fragmentation of the page file.

These days with the ass-loads of RAM in systems, a 1.5 multiplier can lead to ridiculously sized page file and so really isn't necessary anymore. Right now as I check mine (with Windows managing it), I show 6042MB recommended, but 4028 in use (4GB RAM in this system), so even Windows realizes that 1.5x physical is way too much. I definitely wouldn't recommend turning it off completely, that way you always have something to fall back on in case a program you're running has a nasty memory leak and eats up all of your available RAM, but if you really want to have a statically sized pagefile, I'd say to go a minimum of 1GB, with 1.5-2.0 the sweet spot.

I just ordered an 8GB kit for this laptop today (only have two slots, so the existing 4GB will be sold on ebay or craigslist) so we'll see if Windows increases (or decreases) the page file with the added physical RAM when that gets here.

I just let Windows manage it anymore. It's true that it used to be the norm to set it to 1.5x your physical RAM and set that as both the minimum and maximum to prevent fragmentation of the page file.

These days with the ass-loads of RAM in systems, a 1.5 multiplier can lead to ridiculously sized page file and so really isn't necessary anymore. Right now as I check mine (with Windows managing it), I show 6042MB recommended, but 4028 in use (4GB RAM in this system), so even Windows realizes that 1.5x physical is way too much. I definitely wouldn't recommend turning it off completely, that way you always have something to fall back on in case a program you're running has a nasty memory leak and eats up all of your available RAM, but if you really want to have a statically sized pagefile, I'd say to go a minimum of 1GB, with 1.5-2.0 the sweet spot.

I just ordered an 8GB kit for this laptop today (only have two slots, so the existing 4GB will be sold on ebay or craigslist) so we'll see if Windows increases (or decreases) the page file with the added physical RAM when that gets here.

What he said.

Just to add, Windows XP seemed to love to send things to swap when you weren't using an app, and disabling the swap/page file kept it from doing this when you had gobs of memory.  Vista / Win7 seems to be much happier keeping things in memory if it's got it.  Ever notice if you alt-tab on a windows xp system from a fullscreen game and it took forever for the desktop to swap back from the page file... whereas if you do it in Vista/Win7, it does it much more gracefully.

I too just let Windows 7 manage my page file, but i do put it on a non-system drive.

Putting the page file on a secondary partition of the same physical drive will do nothing for performance and in fact may make it worse. So if you have your drive in two equal partitions with the PF on the second partition (the outer half of the drive) and your OS and programs are on the primary partition (the inner half of your drive), every time the OS needs to go to the page file the head will have to seek from the inner half of the drive where all of your programs are to the outer half of the drive where the PF is.

I'd advise it to be better to move your pagefile onto the C: drive and let an intelligent disk fragmenter move the file to the best place on the disk. I believe MyDefrag does this but I don't see anything to confirm this on their site. What may be even better would be to create a very small partition at the beginning of the drive that only holds your pagefile. Make the partition slightly larger than the pagefile you'd like to use and then put nothing else in there. Linux is essentially doing this when it creates the swap partition during install.