For the last 10 years, I have been asking people more knowledgeable than I, "how big should my swap be?"
and the answer has always been "just set it to twice your RAM and forget about it".
In the old days, it wasn't much to think about, 128 megs of ram means 256 megs of swap.
Now that I have 4 gigs of RAM in my laptop, I find myself wondering, "is 8 gigs of swap really necessary?"

How much swap does the average desktop user really need?

Does the whole "twice your RAM rule still apply?
If so, for how much longer will it likely apply? or will it always apply?
or have i been consistently misinformed over the last 10 years?

i made a video briefly explaining the difference between copyright and the creative commons. im not sure if i got everything right, if i made any mistakes here, please let me know about it. http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzv6RZyNrSM

On Feb 14th, 2008, i made my first post that received a Karma bonus multiplier. yay!

i posted in response to universities giving the RIAA student information. the second post got the modifier. I feel special! after 6 years of reading /., i got me some good karma!

a short video explaining how to modify files in your root directory in ubuntu.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iSA5-gRvknQ

I've hidden some slashdot memes in here for good measure. can you find them all?
if only i knew how to fix the damn screen going black after 10 minutes.

I reciently upgraded my laptop from feisty fawn to Ubuntu 7.10. 'Gutsy Gibbon' I believe.

The positive reviews had me really psyched about about the upgrade.

But I have been having several problems. the main one is the massave slowdown. my boot time is 6 minutes. shutting down takes 4 minutes. opening/closing windows takes several seconds, and some things (like changing my pasword) just go on forever.

When I boot up the WinXP partition, my boot time is less than 30 seconds, why is Ubuntu performing so much more slowly?

my laptop is a fugitsu.
the sticer on my laptop, and windows XP tells me i have a AMD Semphron processor, Ubuntu tell sme I have an Athelon 64-bit processor.
1 gb ram, 100 Gb HD divided into 4 partitons (10 gig each for ubuntu and xp, 2 gig swap partition, and the rest is shared)
and a 64 meg ATI radion xpress 1150 videocard (acording to windows)

the main reason i made the switch is because i heard of the dramaticaly improved boot time, and becase of work, I am switching between the OS's quite often.

Should I stick it out with 7.10 and see if i can do any tinkering, or jut go back to feisty?

I am a linux noob, by the way. my reason for switching was because my new laptop came with the vista virus