Windows only resizes the pagefile when absolutely necessary? Interesting thought in theory, but in practical application it just doesn't hold true. Windows pops all sorts of things into the pagefile as it sees fit - WINDOWS determines what is absolutely necessary. We all know windows isn't infallible, and judging by my usage patterns, it will resize the pagefile in a way which I've found to be unnecessary.
Regardless of that, my point is that setting min/max equal ensure you know what is going on with your system, and eliminates any guesswork about what the pagefile is up to and where it resides - a static pagefile is just better than a dynamic one. The only reason to have a dynamic pagefile is to deal with users who have no idea of what their pagefile needs are - the typical windows user. Your statement about the pagefile not resizing anyways if you follow your advice compliments the fact that having a static pagefile size is best to avoid fragmentation, and it shows that setting the max equal to the min is preferred to gaurantee it.
I have 1.25GB of RAM in my system, and a static pagefile. My pagefile usage is far heavier than many peoples, as few people run news readers capable of handling header information the way newsbin pro is. When loading a large newsgroup, all of my RAM is saturated and pageing can get heavy for a while. I've still never had a problem where I've run out of pagefile space.
You also stated how head travel increases seek times in reference to the non-sequential writes windows does to the pagefile. You then stated how pagefile fragmentation would have to be considerable to affect performance noticeably, and I would agree, though its slightly contradictory to your last statement I just highlighted. However, pagefile management is all academic if you have enough RAM in your system for most users on here, so we're talking about establishing best practices here really - noticeable system performance isn't that relevant here. My point is that if all your pagefile seeks are in a contiguous 1GB (for example) area of the disk rather than different areas spanning several GB, your head travel is going to be minimized on average.
Having a static, contigous pagefile is a best practice, and ensuring this requires the min and max to be set equal. If one finds they made a mistake when setting this value, it can always be adjusted. The bottom line in application, is that if your pagefile utilization is affecting system performance mentionably, you should upgrade to a larger amount of RAM because tweaking the pagefile just won't help you much. To me, this is an issue of taking control from an OS who assumes the operator doesn't really know what he's doing... Its a basic difference of approach which can be contrasted with that of most Linux distros.
BTW, if anyone thinks that pagefile tweaking does affect performance mentionably... Refer to part III in the following original post of this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=34&threadid=1678445&enterthread=y