thanks for the replies...
let me give you my memory situation now... i'm running mandrake 10 with KDE now... i have opera open with 3 pages, azureus with 2 torrents running, KDE system Load (monitor app), XMMS with Madman music library and stereo effects, Mandrake Control Center, and the rest of the system processes running... all 256 mb ram of physical memory is being used and about 210 mb of swap.. azureus is using the most ram 272mb ram... and X is using 100mb...opera 80mb..
everything is running fine now without a glitch... the problem comes when i run VMWare with WinXP... when i do... my harddisk hardly ever stops working... then everything grinds to a crawl...even then not all my swap is used... about 300mb... i was thinking if i split the swap load between 2 hard disks maybe it would run faster... i know more ram would fix it but i dont want to spend money on sdram... i'd rather save and get a new mother board and some ddram...
it is amazing though when VMWare really clogged up my system i was expecting something to crash... everything worked slow... but linux was stable as a rock... once i closed VMWare everything was back to normal.... if i were on XP the only way out of that would have been reset... i didnt even have to reboot... i'm impressed!!!
u may be thinkin why i dont just dual boot... well thats coz my mother board and processor are not the best of friends... my old processor got fried... and i have to update the BIOS for my motherboard to recognise the processor as Athlon XP 2000 ... right now it says unknown AMD processor... and WinXP gives a hardware configuration error and wont install... strange isnt it... mine is probably the only box which has hardware probs with WinXP and not with Linux!! and i need macromedia flash MX 2004 for this project i'm doing... so i just need WinXP for a couple weeks only...
anyways.. i guess i'll try the 2 swap partition idea... and see if it actually helps...but i dont want to reboot

i'm shattering every uptime record i ever had with WinXP... and aiming to shatter my friend's WinXP uptime record of about a week
thanks for the help...
ps.. i was wondering if there is a way to force a program like azureus (java bittorrent client) to use more swap instead of my physical ram... coz its only downloading... i dont really need it to be super responsive...