Windows swapping is brain dead (Score 1)

The way windows handles virtual memory is the reason why I have ran with no paging file on my home Windows XP machine (1GB RAM) for the past 5 years. Prior to this, when using multiple applications that made use of most of the available physical memory there would be considerable delays whilst the previously inactive application was paged back in despite not exceeding the available physical memory. I assume that this was paged out for disk cache in order to attempt to improve overall performance. However, consistency in response time is much more important to me than possibly having cached something. In addition, if allocated memory ever exceeds the total physical memory even by a small amount then performance became so appalling that I would prefer the application that was leaking memory to be killed than to wait for 5 minutes whilst the system swaps.