Well, as to swap, you can change it at a later date, if needs be, by repartitioning your drive to reduce unused swap.
Obvious statement number 1: there's more harm done by too liitle swap, than by too much :).
Obvious statement number 2: how much swap is always a question for debate.
What I tend to recommend to newcomers is (if they're installing a commercial dstribution) take a look at the recommended minimum RAM for their chosen configuration, and give it twice that, in swap - regardless of how much RAM they have. Install everything, and then, after install, play around with a few different loads and look at cat/proc/meminfo, to see what's going on. If your swap isn't being used, then no harm will come of liberating a bit more disk space at its expense.
Obvious statement number 3: with the cost of RAM these days, there's little excuse for having an empty RAM-card slot on your motherboard if performance is your concern, regardless of your CPU. It's a tired old saw, I know, but there's nought like slapping more RAM into a machine for giving your processes some elbow room.
That said, you'd be surprised how old-fashioned things can get, in terms of memory consumption, once you start running a great big database server on a machine (There's nought like a query that retrives a million records from three tables at once for giving a machine a headache :). Even some desktop apps (Dreamweaver MX running over Wine is a good example) can be remarkably memory hungry (but the same is true when these apps are running in their native environments, of course ;).
On a last general note, no one should be without a copy of "Running Linux", from Tim's lot - the book is an absolute goldmine!
Best
Dan
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