Speed and performance in Ubuntu Hardy

During my Windows days (long time ago) I had always been interested in trying out all sorts of half-assed, snake-oil type schemes to speed up performance on my computer. However, I soon learnt that the vast majority, if not all, of these so-called tips, were simply nonsense.
Nevertheless, I came across this blogpost and decided I'd try out the suggestions just to see. My reasoning was that I have a lot more faith in suggestions made in the Linux arena than I have for Windows which seems surrounded by an army of gobshites and chancers.
Now I didn't do the writeback (in /etc/fstab) option due to the warnings given by the author.
The problem with these tweaks is that it's hard to truly judge whether or not there has been any performance improvement, but in general I can't say I noticed any difference, bad or good.
Nevertheless, it's best to leave it over a few days to see if anything at all has changed.
The boot time(from selecting Ubuntu from the Grub menu to the cpu reverting to 0% on the desktop) was 82 seconds. Unfortunately, I had never measured it before but certainly it doesn't seem like it booted any faster or slower than before.

Additionally, I now get about 80% of the bandwidth that I'm paying the ISP for. However, according to the ISP, anything over 78% is acceptable. Well, OK. At least, they didn't say anything over 0% was OK by them.
Nevertheless, I wanted to see if there was anyway to add a few bps to my bandwidth. I am of course aware of the plethora of total garbage, and fake claims and offers, that envelope this issue particularly in the Windows arena.
However, from the same blog as I used earlier in this post I got this and tried it.
I then tried three different speed tests (speakeasy, gambitdesign and the one from my ISP). Every single one of them showed absolutely no evidence for any improvement whatsoever.

So, a bit of a blank day on the performance front but at least things didn't get worse. In reality, I'd like to observe how things look over the next few days before drawing a final conclusion.