The setup:

Thinkpad x40 without harddisk, 1GB of RAM. The hard-disks for these models are very slow, rare and expensive. This is why I installed Ubuntu 11.10 onto the USB. The system will be used for net - FF, and some office docs editing. If possible, I might setup a second PC, used for XBMC.

I have tried live Ubuntu USBs with the same PC and USB, and the setup is OK. I am limited to 4 GBs, though. This is why I chose to perform normal install.

The problems:

The system feels slow, and freezes every other second. I have no swap, only one root partition.

What I have tried:

sudo apt-get install preload

Use memory instead of disk

Add these lines to /etc/sysctl.conf, and reboot.

vm.swappiness = 0

vm.dirty_background_ratio = 20

vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 0

vm.dirty_ratio = 80

vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 0

Mount /tmp onto ramdisk
Code:

mkdir /dev/shm/tmp

chmod 1777 /dev/shm/tmp

mount --bind /dev/shm/tmp /tmp

Still, the system is slow to the point of being unusable. Are there any other tweaks that can be done. I read that some parts of the system might be mounted into RAM, and that would be beneficial, but which parts and how to do that. I also read that compressing parts of the system might help, I dont know how to do that , too