Lobster wrote:

What about the swap file location though - have I done right? I note John's
suggestion above to have it on a physically separate drive... now, I do have
an old 8Gb HDD I could use for that.

A drive that small is likely to be old, and therefore slower, and
potentially waiting to die soon (not that losing a swap file would
matter much).

Currently I have two HDDs running on
one IDE channel, and two DVD drives on the other - only really need one, so
is it appropriate/beneficial to replace one with an HDD - if so, which? I
thought mix'n match on one cable wasn't a good idea?

have the hard drive you expect to access most on a channel by itself,
and the other hard drive sharing with the optical drive, That's one of
the beauties of using SATA instead of IDE ... no shared controllers.

Finally - swapfile size etc: I've read so many opinions on this online today
my head is spinning. My PC RAM is now max'ed out at 1Gb, so the smart money
seems to reckon that 1.5Gb is about optimum size? And there seem to be
equal opinions on whether the min and max swapfile size should be set as the
same, to prevent fragmentation, or not?

With only 1GB, I'd say another 1GB or 1.5GB of swap is probably enough,
if you regularly use much of the swapfile you ought to be upgrading to a
machine that can handle more physical memory ...

I'd definitely fix the swap size so that it doesn't cause fragmentation.