Hi
My experience with Ubuntu is this:-
When I only had 256MB of RAM installed it was forever swapping, HDD was clunking in and out all the time. Now I've added an extra 1GB. When I look in my System Monitor I see that I seldom use much over half a gig of RAM anyway, and my 'Used swap' is 0 or some very very small value.
So I don't think that altering swappiness will have much effect for me. Unless I started using some software that was extremely memory intensive which forced swapping.
Try changing swappiness by all means, but first check whether you are actually doing any swapping at all.
Good luck.

