Here's a fun fact, swap space won't make things faster, it just makes things a little more stable - servers usually have a ton of swap space and are configured to use them frequently so that they won't crash when they run out of memory. For normal usage, we don't really like swap, it's a thousand times slower than your RAM. So when your computer has no choice but to use swap, the slowdown will be so significant and things will start to crash and burn. A workaround is to tell Linux that you want to use the swap frequently so that you won't really crash or hang upon running out of RAM, but the overall performance impact will still be quite huge. If you have a SSD, that would be slightly faster but of course it will wear out the disk...the world is not perfect :)
Yea I can tell that it is going to be some fun for you to play with Linux again, this thing never gets old. You have a billion ways to customize it, and of course billions of ways to mess it up too. The insanity never stops.
So true @lilacse, and another aspect I love about tinkering with VM's is the fact that you can make clones, completely mess shit up, then just refer back to the clone as a starting point. Such fun!!! haha
Just saying, you can mess up your host OS from a guest OS :) There's a way for that. Happy researching :P
Using Virtualbox? I didn't know this!