But whatever difference the two approaches have between them in performance it's probably negligible compared to the penalty of using swap in the first place, in many cases anyway if not all.
This is more or less what I mostly came to say — how's that for convoluted. But to wit: Who cares whose approach to swap is "better"? Swap is crap. Most of us don't need any. We've beat this horse well beyond death here on Slashdot repeatedly. RAM is stupid cheap now. There are a few things that people do with their PCs now that take more than 8GB of RAM, like high-res video streaming from the same PC on which they're gaming or doing live video stream manipulation or whatever it is they're doing, and no amount of swap will help you do those things. All swap does it make your system thrash before it crashes.
With that said, the way windows handles paging is crap. It only lets you make one swapfile per drive, and you can't swap directly to a partition; mkswap is a lot faster than mkfs, or even an ntfs quick format, let alone the real thing. If you want more paging on the same volume with linux, you just create another swapfile and swapon to it at a lower priority than your primary file. When you no longer need more paging, you swapoff the file and you can delete it. If you let Windows manage the length of the paging file, then if that ever actually happens, you just wind up with fragmentation and that will impact system performance while swapping, for real. It will also impact your ability to defrag, since the paging file can't be moved while it's in use. You have to remove it, reboot, defrag, enable it, and reboot, since pagedefrag doesn't work after Windows XP.
TL;DR: the best way to manage paging on Windows is to disable it for all volumes. The best way to manage paging on Linux is to not create a swap partition or file. It's better to crash sooner and reboot than to crash later and reboot... later.
