I just built a new computer and installed SUSE on it. I currntly have 512MB of ram on it and want to upgrade it. When I do how do I change the size of the SWAP partition?

Thanks

If your swap is already 1GB, you probably don't need to. Otherwise, you can create a 1GB partition at the end of the drive, format it as swap space, and then change your /etc/fstab file to use the new partition.

What are you trying to do?
Reduce the swap size?
Then please give us the output of:
"fdisk -l"

You probably don't need to change your swap - after all, the only time swap gets used is if the system pushes RAM past capacity, and the system is forced to write out memory pages to disk. The more RAM you have, the less likely that becomes, and if you're running a typical desktop and have at least 256Mg or 512Mg of swap, most likely that will be plenty. If you are running a massively loaded server you would need more, but at least for my own personal home PC's, 256Mg is all I ever give it.

As an aside, the "swap should equal twice RAM" rule was important back in the day, where having 16 or 32Mg of RAM was bleeding edge, and it was not all that difficult for the system load to max out physical memory. These days however, where 256Mg, 512Mg, or even 1G of RAM is becoming common, the importance of swap is diminishing. It won't hurt to create a larger swap space, but it probably isn't necessary, and it wastes disk space

Changing the size of the swap partition takes a while because you have to backup the data on other partitions and then change the partition table. Linux gives you another way to add more swap by using a file instead from a partition.

I set 256 MB for swap and I have a gigabyte of RAM. The only time Linux goes to the swap is when I play games or leave it on for two days. When I leave it on for two days, Linux only eats a few kilobytes, but that is only if I leave foldingathome running.

To setup a file for a swap that is going to be about 512 MB in size.
1) dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swapfile bs=1048576 count=512
2) mkswap /tmp/swapfile
3) swapon /tmp/swapfile

You can place the line below in /etc/fstab but its optional.
/tmp/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

You should see more swap space if you type free or type cat /proc/swaps