Linux mint 18.3 running slow after resizing partitions

[Person from Porlock]

Hello,
I recently repartitioned my laptop, which I had been running as a dual boot, by deleting the old windows partition using gparted and allocating the entire diskspace to Linux mint. I'd been running mint 18.2 which always worked really well on my machine (it's old with 2GB RAM, 160GB storage, 64 bit architecture). In the process I also moved and increased the swap partition from 2GB to 3GB. Unfortunately now the machine takes a long time to boot (2-3 minutes instead of a few seconds as before) and all the processes seem to run more slowly during a session.
I've searched multiple threads with people having had similar issues but have been unable to resolve the problem. I checked the new partitions are aligned (they are) and also the swap's UUID seems to be correct.
I took the opportunity to update to Linux mint 18.3 in case this would resolve the issue (and with an eye to moving on to mint 19 once I have checked that my old hardware is supported), but that has not solved the problem.
Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated.

[carum carvi]

Would you object to doing a fresh new install? Takes about an hour in total, including updates and tweaks. I use a new fresh install often to weed out similar problems.

Are you using Cinnamon, Mate or Xfce? 2Gb is not a lot of RAM. My girlfriend has a similar amount of RAM and her computer manages LM18.3 Cinnamon, but is rather slow. I wouldnt advice you to upgrade to LM19, with so little RAM memory. But to be clear, your problems with slow boot (2-3) minutes are definitely not normal and are certainly not caused by your 2GB RAM memory.

I dont have experience with increasing Swap memory though, therefore another forummember hopefully can help you along with that.

[Person from Porlock]

Thanks for your reply. I'm using Cinnamon, although I don't think it's the desktop that's the issue.
It started running and booting slow after I deleted windows and resized/moved the partitions. That was on 18.2 even before I updated to 18.3. So I'm assuming something in the file system's gone awry - which should therefore be fixable (if I could work it out!).
I will do a complete reinstall if it comes to that (everything's backed up). But I'd actually quite like to work out what has happened, so as to hopefully learn a bit more about the OS.

[athi]

Remembered a recent post about slow boot after partition change. The problem was the UUID of the partition in fstab.

May want to see if the UUID in fstab matches UUID of partitions in Disks.

[Person from Porlock]

Thanks for the suggestion. I think I read the same post during research about this. They do match - it appears that the UUID in fstab appears to be correct.
I compared /etc/fstab to /dev/disk/by-UUID.
So the problem must be something else.

[AndyMH]

Do the UUIDs for the swap partition match? I would use sudo blkid in a terminal to find out the UUIDs to check with fstab. An incorrect UUID on swap would explain the long boot time.

[Person from Porlock]

Yes, unfortunately they do match so that can't be the problem.
Results of blkid:

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/dev/sda5: UUID="4ac3474b-0b47-425d-874a-8a1c03ee302d" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="45543874-05"
/dev/sda6: UUID="dfdc6ef7-15a5-461a-818f-902018611c49" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="45543874-06"

Contets of fstab:

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=4ac3474b-0b47-425d-874a-8a1c03ee302d /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sdb6 during installation
UUID=dfdc6ef7-15a5-461a-818f-902018611c49 none            swap    sw              0       0

[deepakdeshp]

Do you have sufficient free space in partitions?

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 df -m|grep sd

will give free space.