25 core is typo, i mean to say 256, that is the maximum number of cores supported by win7. win8 is might be a little better in few terms but overall its not better then win7 ( atleast form me, and the type of application i use) its even not good for gaming PC many top of the line games are reported to frequently crash in win8 ( DX 11.1x is till not stable). And personally I hate the Metro UI
i was referring to a pc for general use general (page file needed) for a htpc its a same what you said. For normal PC like what i have, (12gb ram, manual 18gb - 24 Gb page file seting, 6-core AMD, DDR-5 1gb GPU) while editing 18-megapixel RAW file sometime that even seems less. So PF is directly proportion to the type of work you want from you PC.
SSD people might be disabling pagefile, as SSD is costly storage. and it generally start any program comparatively faster so no need of page file.