I finally got around to doing first the extended file system hack then the swap on the new partition one and wanted to share my observations.

The device is certainly a lot more stable. No more "Out of memory" warnings which I used to get with as little as 2 browser windows open. Now I can run all sorts of things and haven't seen any memory errors. The device also seems faster but it is hard to really quantify that. General loading of stuff is still slow as a dog. 15 seconds for the video player to open a 1 hour episode of Top Gear for example. Or 10 seconds to jump from the first page to the last of a 33 page PDF file. But I guess these sort of things you wouldn't expect to be faster. The email app definitely seems faster as does the file manager. I installed the CPU/Memory Load Applet with the mod to allow me to turn on and off the swap (available on the Maemo downloads page). That works great once I found out I had to edit my /etc/sudoers file to allow the swapon, swapoff command to work without a password.

The biggest change I have found is whereas before I would have to remember to close things before opening others (like I would have to stop the browser to open the inbox) now I can run multiple things and change between them quickly.

Thanks to you guys who figure out how to do all this stuff and make it possible for us Linux newbies to get them running without too much drama.

Simon