I remember reading somewhere its not a good idea to mess with any of that. ay truth to that?
If you can regularly use most of your RAM, you should keep the page file around. Even without OOM errors or crashes, you will get slower performance due to less RAM being used for file caches over time. If you have GBs to spare, turning it off is perfectly fine, but knowing how much you have to spare is not something you will be able to quickly look up. Using a mechanical HDD, I've kept it off for 4+ years now, and love it. But, you must have significantly more RAM than you can utilize to make it worthwhile. The truth is that knowing how much total memory you need is going to difficult to measure, without logging your peak commit before every shutdown, and Windows is good at making the page file useful when you aren't out of memory.
Making a very small page file is somewhat on the pointless side, IMO. Windows is very much tweaked to use the page file as a backing cache, so that when you don't need to clear out RAM, unchanged pages sit idly in the page file, and when you do, they can be cleared from RAM without writing them to disk. For the worst-case scenario, running out of memory, a small page file will not protect you very much. A large page file gives all the caching benefits, makes memory management easier on the OS*, and protects you from running out of RAM at an inopportune moment. Not that a small page file will never do anything, but it gives you a very small buffer, and you should care about those times when things don't go smoothly.
A 1GB page file will only protect you from (a) rare buggy applications you shouldn't be using, that try to micromanage where their data goes, and (b) running out of memory by a few hundred megabytes. As cheap as RAM is today, if you run out of RAM by less than a few GBs, you need more RAM. If you run out of RAM by a few GBs, be glad you had the page file. If you don't have a page file, be sure that you have at least 50-100% more RAM
(safety buffer) than you realistically ever utilize, so that you won't run out of RAM w/o encountering a severe memory leak bug (in which case it's going to crash anyway).
IMO, either get enough RAM that you can turn it off (12+GB for RAM-heavy gaming, FI), let Windows manage it, or make the size fixed and large enough to be useful in the worst cases.
* When allocating virtual memory, it needs some kind of physical memory backing it up. But, it does not need to reside in any actual memory until it is accessed
(IoW, a big page file improves performance when you aren't using all your RAM). Many programs like to allocate more than they need to either speed up common tasks
(allocating 300MB to open several complex web pages, even if only 50MB are needed right now); become aware of limitations
(kind of rare, today, but Windows allows OOM to be trapped and handled, so an app can know how big arbitrary-sized data can get, or use it as an ugly way to kick off garbage collection); or allocate the maximum it may need, and quit before it starts working if there isn't enough.
A page file >=RAM
(IE, a safe size for most anybody, but 3-4GB might be enough) allows these situations to be handled much easier, since the OS needs to provide or deny memory based on what it knows it can provide (reserve), yet at the same time, not do anything with it in main RAM until necessary (commit), since actually accessing all the allocated virtual memory right away is a rare case at any given time with any given application, and much an application's initial memory will be idle for most of its lifetime, so is generally safe to clear out as needed
(it's still in the page file) (total VM mapped memory can exceed total DRAM+pagefile). By treating it as the rare case, enough physical memory can be available to handle the occasional instance of an application actually trying to use it all at once, so applications for which it is not rare still benefit from this treatment being applied across the board, to all other applications.
If you have enough RAM to effectively make up for necessary page file space, turning it off works fine. If not, or if an OOM error could cost you money, realize that Windows isn't making the page file big for no reason, and you are being benefited by it. It's more than a memory buffer of last resort. Also, if you have an SSD with enough free space to house the page file, the responsiveness benefits of removing it pretty much go away.
There's debate about turning off the pagefile completely.
IMO, most of it is based on misunderstood and outdated information, coming from both sides of the issue. Small fast SSDs and cheap dense RAM make the issue very different than before Vista came out. Your computer won't blow up if the page file is not there, you can make benchmarks to support any PF config (PF <RAM, PF >=RAM, no PF), and even interpret the same results differently
(example: he sees no benefit, I see a 50% FPS improvement), but you need as much total RAM as you used to need RAM+swap to safely disable it
(do you know exactly how much of your PF you really needed under your highest memory loads, including file caches?).
P.S. Found it!
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL405
Get at least the mid-sized WMV, and start at 1h09m, to get an idea of how to size the PF. Note, as well, how much info you would need to perfectly size it, and that if you make it too small, you will know it was too small, but an application crash or general slowdown may not give you the info you need to ideally size it. On one hand, the RAM*x may not be ideal, but finding just how much you need is involved, and much harder than using a few more GBs or buying more RAM.