So if the page file is so slow, why even have it? Without a page file, your applications will crash or seriously malfunction, as any additional information that needs to be stored in RAM will simply be lost.
The only difference is that reading information from a hard drive is much, much slower than RAM. From the application’s point of view, it’s just more RAM. When your apps need more RAM than your computer physically has, it needs to use “virtual memory” which is exactly what the page file is.
