Windows loves to doodle in the pagefile all day long, whether you have 1 byte of memory free or 3GB free. Why? Who knows?
Disabling the pagefile just means that Windows runs everything in memory and if you run out of memory you're dead, since you have no pagefile to swap things out to.
In any case, this definitely isn't the cause of the 8min boot time, but it's not a bad idea to do on every system.