... from a dev perspective at least. When you allocate an amount larger than the system RAM for some reason, maybe by accident, or maybe because MSVC miscompiles your code. Then Windows proceeds to page everything out to disk, including task manager, which means you can't shut down the offending program. Your computer then becomes completely unresponsive. 5 Minutes later, when you can finally kill the program, then every other program competes in a fight to the death to read in 1 byte of paged memory from disk at a time, which takes forever.
A couple of ideas for the Windows devs:
* Don't page task manager to disk, ever.
* Get a decent IO scheduler so programs don't read like 1 byte between a disk seek.