Regarding the stalling etc my Dell laptop is doing ( some kind of memory problem) would it be worth upgrading to an SSD drive?
I have looked online at my model and found that it is compatible with an SSD drive:
I remember Mark posting on here when I first joined ( with my Mint netbook) that SSDs are better than non SSDs.
SSD worth it?
OH YEAH!!! 
Not only are they stupidly quicker than a hard drive, but because they have no moving parts they’re much less prone to physical damage which IMHO is a MUST for laptops (or any computer that may be moved whilst on).
The downside is they cost considerably more than an equivalent capacity hard drive, so if you need high capacity storage the ideal is to have your OS and apps on an SSD, and use an external HDD for user file storage.
Once you use an SSD, you’ll never go back to an HDD for anything other than storage 
Thanks Mark- I will get this Dell an SSD when I have the money then! I expect that there is less incidences of laptop freezings with an SSD then? I replied to the 2 other problems by the way…
I’ve upgraded my desktop Kubuntu to a 120gb SSD and, heck, it’s fast. I would recommend a SSD to everyone.
I bought mine from ebuyer (NOT ebay).
I think this Chromebook I’m on at the moment has an SSD and yes it’s fast but I still get the “memory monitor” coming up every so often and it says I am nearly out of RAM and have to reboot ( just the same on the Dell Peppermint).
There’s no real fix for running out of RAM besides having a large swap partition … but on a system with an HDD when swap is used instead of RAM your PC will slow to a crawl, and with an SSD it will eventually wear out the SSD … so there’s no better alternative to getting more RAM.
What exactly are you doing when your system runs out of RAM ?
I’m editing pics, downloading pics, accessing files from my Google docs, surfing the web. I did download Pocket in Google apps as it means I can save sites there and not have a few tabs open ( sometimes I’m doing a few things at once).
Mark,
In post #5 you say:
… on a system with an HDD when swap is used instead of RAM your PC will slow to a crawl, and with an SSD it will eventually wear out the SSD .
Why would an SSD wear out? And presumably it would “wear out” eventually with ordinary, non-swap use, too.
Each block of an SSD (or any flash memory) has a finite amount of write cycles, so write to a block too many times and it dies … now SSD firmware makes sure that doesn’t happen by using clever “wear levelling” algorithms, but…
A small swap partition that gets heavy use because of low RAM will wear out faster because
a) using a drive as swap writes a LOT of temporary data
and
b) the (usually) small size of a swap partition concentrates the write operations on a single part of the drive … thwarting the efforts of the wear levelling firmware.
Modern SSD’s will likely outlast an HDD for normal operation, but you should avoid using them for swap on systems without much RAM where the swap partition will likely get a hammering.
[EDIT]
For the same reason you should never overfill an SSD partition … the more free space, the better wear levelling job the firmware can do.
Many thanks for your very detailed explanation, Mark.
Regards,
Keith
NP