> Well, my trusty old laptop has only 48 MB, and I must confess that I'm
> sometimes not sure I really understand the logic behind having a considerable
> file cache while swapping at the same time.

me too. i reduce vm.filemin, filemax and increate anonmin/max/execmin/max 
everywhere. in practice when really lot of disk traffic goes on the buffer 
cache gets more than set anyway.