Steve
So my questions: Is nfs the way to go to share files & directories from a server to laptops, or should I stick with Samba?
Is the Ubuntu link above a sensible way of setting things up? I was thinking I'd just manually keep the user names/numbers in sync between the computers - is that OK? Is there a better way of doing things?
Personally, I use rsync or owncloud if I want copies on both server and laptops (and I mean to try git annex sometime), or sshfs or ftp for most other transfers. If samba works for you despite its nasty Windows-inspired background, go with that. I don't think there's any Brilliant Right Way for this yet.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo seems like a valid way of doing it, but I expect we all have our preferences (like I liked it to be interruptable and have timeouts, but maybe they've got sensible defaults in ubuntu). I'm not sure why it's being slow for you and I don't remember how to track such things down any more.
It's OK to keep things in sync manually, but I think NIS is the usual better way to do it - maybe LDAP has surpassed that now.
Hope that helps,