So, I recently upgraded my laptop's RAM to 4GB. I did it mostly so that I could give a VirtualBox machine 2GB safely, but the RAM is still there the rest of the time? So, does anyone know of hacks I can do to maximise my ram usage, that will speed me up in other ways? Particularly, I wouldn't minde having programs load faster, and graphics perform better. I already turned off my swap, but I've heard some reports that that's bad to do, so I might change it so that it's on again, but with a swappiness of about 10. Anybody have any other little tips and tricks?

I'm running Ubuntu Jaunty, if it makes a difference.

Linux makes very intelligent use of unallocated RAM - almost all of it will generally be used as either cache (data from the hard disk, since RAM is way, way, way faster than disk) or buffers (when a program writes to disk, Linux will instead write to RAM and flush that whenever, allowing the program to move on sooner). What more are you looking for? Memory leaks?