"PF Usage" in Task Manager is
not how much space is used for your paging file on disk. Get sysinternals' Process Explorer, it has better names of the various stats, and it shows more than taskmgr.
Don't take "XP myths" as the holy grail - I think we already had a topic about this a while ago. I don't really want to revisit that, but "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".
Pagefile on a separate partition on the same physical disk doesn't really do anything for performance, neither in a positive or negative direction. There's two reasons it could be advantagous, though. Number one is fragmentation, but that's solved by choosing a sensible minimum-size for the pf, as well as defragmenting. Number two is reducing the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer crashes while there's pagefile activity, but that's not very likely to happen, and NTFS reduces the risk of corruption dramatically.
On my own box, I run without a paging file - Windows utilizes it a bit too much even when not necessary, and with 2 gigs of ram I'd rather not have that additional disk access, even if I do sometimes have to enable it temporarily for some special-case pograms. On other systems, even multi-disk systems, I keep the pagefile on the system partition... if the pagefile becomes a bottleneck, you
need additional memory, and moving the pf to a separate physical disk just isn't a solution.
Minimal pf size really depends on what you're doing, and all the magical formulas for calculating it are just that - magic. If you're only ever occasionally running a bit short of memory, you don't need a two-gig pagefile just because you have one gig of memory - it's not like windows flushes your entire memory to disk to make room for new apps, it pages out individual ranges of memory that haven't been used for a while. That said, with the large disk drives of today, I tend to set pagefiles to 1gig min with no fixed upper size - that way, you won't have fragmentation for typical use, and if things go apeshit, windows can extend the pagefile.
Darwin: I'd remove the pagefile on your "documents" partition. While NTFS is pretty safe etc., and even if you're doing daily backups etc., a "documents" partition really should have as little activity as possible, just to be para^H^H^H^Hsafe.
By the way, a thing that makes a difference on "lower-memory" machines: the
DisablePagingExecutive system setting. This prevent windows from paging out the kernel and drivers. Back when I had 512meg, I had noticably faster "system recovery" after exiting memory-hungry things like games.
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