See, whenever I turn it off I start getting major hangs after a while, then it starts telling me i'm out of memory, its making a page file, etc.

Alan, next time you're doing all those things at once, open task manager and see how much memory you're using. I want to believe you but I don't think you're maxing out your memory at all

This covers it in layman's terms http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

As we've seen, the only tangible benefit of disabling the pagefile is that restoring minimized applications you haven't used in a while is going to be faster. This comes at the price of not being able to actually use all your RAM for fear of your applications crashing and burning once you hit the limit, and experiencing a lot of weird system issues in certain applications.

The vast majority of users should never disable the pagefile or mess with the pagefile settings—just let Windows deal with the pagefile and use the available RAM for file caching, processes, and Superfetch. If you really want to speed up your PC, your best options are these:

    Upgrade your RAM.
    Clean off the crapware—the biggest cause of system slowdown.
    Switch to Microsoft Security Essentials and stop paying for bloated Windows security packages.
    Windows 7 handles multi-tasking much better than Windows XP did.

And a study with some tests:
http://www.howtogeek.com/95915/heres-why-disabling-the-windows-pagefile-is-pointless/

Really, I guess it boils down to how you use your PC and knowing how much memory you are using as to whether you should disable it.

Yeah I've tried that plenty - I often reboot my copy as it updates every day (Aurora beta channel). Firefox uses about 1-1.5Gb, I haven't had a leaky version for ages, its just the amount of stuff I have open. I can end up working on 10-20 websites over the course of a week and have to keep chopping and changing between them, then factor in social tabs, gmail, web design related sites, etc. You end up with 100s of tabs open and no really good way of reducing the memory footprint.  Assess how much I often have open and it's easy to see why it wouldn't be practical to do that, I really hammer my machine. I can't be dealing with constantly opening and closing stuff all the time, its counter productive when you switch tasks as much as I usually have to:

Take Firefox then factor in an open copy of IE, Chrome and Safari for site testing. Then Photoshops huge memory footprint (a couple of GB easy), then Illustrator. Then someone will have emailed me a crappy Powerpoint and a Word doc and a PDF. Then I'll have a 10Mb CSV feed open in Excel, 5/6 notepad windows with scripts, snippets, etc in. Live Mail open, Skype for calls, Spotify for music, FTP program, uTorrent, Steam, a Bitcoin client and more often than not the Miner itself running (except when I'm doing lots of photoshop work, its unbearable) - then the worst bloatware of them all, Live Messenger!

For me to turn off paging I'd need 16GB minimum I reckon, 32Gb would be 'safe' for it IMO.