How to make Mint faster.

After I installed Mint 12 (aka Lisa) I found that it took me about 10 minutes to boot and most programs took about a minute to start. Briefly I wondered if the copious amount of crap that went wrong with the netbook (its an AO D150) when it was running Windows 7 could have been to blame. A quick DuckDuckGo search later brought this article to my attention and the instructions worked like a charm. Hopefully it will help if you guys are having the same problem.

Of course at this point in time I have no idea what "swappiness" is or why that worked but I shall be doing a bit of reading on the topic.

EDIT
I found this link that explains why the steps outlined in the above article may have worked.