"your computer is low on memory, please close X program"

older software and some new software is still designed to use the Page File.

That's an incorrect statement.

Sorry to disagree  jayy78 but what Boss was saying was correct. A well known example is that you need a pagefile for dump files to be created when the system fails.

Yes, that's what I said in the middle of my post, but "you need" is a stretched reason. "you need" the page file only in certain circumstances, which are rarely encountered, which would make up 0,001% of the total time used of an application. If stable applications are used, and plenty of RAM is available, then a page file is not used, nor needed. I often run 5GB of RAM usage and plenty of apps, from VMware to several chrome and firefox profiles at once (about 20 or so exe's). Not one made issues or requested a page file.

Wow,  sir, with that kind of attitude you should surely be aware (ha) of the large address aware option for 32bit apps. They can use above 3GB in 64bit Windows. 

Regardless, unless the behavior has changed in Windows 8.1, Windows will not "want" to use more than 80% of RAM  installed in the machine. The rest is swapped out to pagefile if available and the low memory warning is issued when the pagefile is exhausted. Considering that 20% adds up to a lot of free RAM in  8GB machine, never mind 16GB, it's a pretty stupid feature. 

Now I have been too lazy to check if this feature still exists in Win 8.1 or the 16GB machine at work so it's possible it's been capped at something more sensible like 512MB. 

There's this person who wants to argue this for the sake of arguing but it's not difficult at all to test experimentally. All you need is a small test program that will allocate given amount of ram and you'll see it in action. Keeping reserve RAM is sensible enough but allowing the reserve to grow into large absolute values is not.

Yes Männistö, I'm aware of that, that's why I said for user applications in a comment on page 1 and some guy snired back with a comment "So, the answer is: Go to windows server".

However, to my understanding, applications need to be hardcoded with for LARGEADDRESSAWARE and the kernel flag for the OS needs to be set to use that. It's a lot of hassle that no one goes through, that's why in the case of Chrome it's not valid. Chrome uses caches in disk, other than Virtual Memory to avoid using workaround for large memory usage. The issues, however come from bugs, especially when using ABP, Tampermonkey, Stylish etc. So these memory hogs are not counted in when devs actually prepare Chrome for release, and a clean Chrome would rarely make issues like these.

Don't know if it's a feature, nor can I personally call it stupid. If a bug as mentioned just earlier, makes an application eat up large amounts of RAM you don't know how fast that dumping goes to VM in order to tell of the actual RAM is freed up (dumped to page file) fast enough than it is filled by the leak. In such cases, reaching the bounds of that trigger is well within the realm of possibility.

Features like this, as I've said before, are meant for average user systems, 1 or 2 GB of RAM, in no way is an 8GB or, let alone, 16GB average. For these systems we have settings at hand to manage what we don't like.

Also why bother changing the limit? It's better to disable this feature all together and use some RAM cleanup tool if it hits an upper limit. If RAM is eaten by leakey applications, then such tools would basically "fix" the leaks by freeing up wasted memory.