I think I made my swap partition too small. It is only 2 gig. This is what
free says:
$ free
                total           used            free           shared
 buffers      cached
Mem:       1653812    1512472     141340      32440     156544     427816
-/+ buffers/cache:     928112     725700
Swap:      1638396          0    1638396

The only reason swap is at 0 usage is I just turned it back on ()I was
trying to modify things with gparted. I think I am going to need to use
gparted from a live disk.

Here is what I'm thinking:

first- here is what fdisk says:
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1530    12289693   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1530        6375    38917462   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            6375       30402   192996877    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            6375        6579     1638630   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda6            6579       12953    51199155   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           12953       23838    87433762   83  Linux
/dev/sda8           23838       30402    52725330   83  Linux

Now I think I'll shrink sda8 and put the new swap in that newly created
space. Afterwards I'll delete sda5 and grow sda6 to encompass the newly
freed space.
What do you think..... am I wasting my time?
about 15 minutes after first running free it now says:

                total              used     free
Swap:      1638396       1404    1636992

I only have two things running on my xfce desktop. the terminal emulator
and chromium with three tabs open on it
:-)~MIKE~(-: