Originally Posted by jamminJohn
I think you gave the best answers to your own question. Running Disk Cleanup and Defrag should help a lot with performance, if you haven't done it in a while. Also, any type of anti-spyware program will help limit potentially harmful cookies. Since your hard drive is currently less than 30% full, I don't really think that an external drive would give you much benefit in performance. The other thing that you really should check is how many applications, or processes, you have running. If you have a lot of things running in the background this can cause major performance issues. You may want to shut down anything that you don't really need. Often, when you install an application, the default setting will be to start the application when you boot your computer. This can cause a lot of applications to run in the background that you are not even using. You can go into Windows Task Manager and manually shut these down or you can run MSCONFIG and in your System Configuration Utility under the Startup tab, you can deselect any applications that you don't want running when you load Windows. Then reboot your computer and it should run a little smoother. Also, of course, the more applications you run, the more memory you need, so adding more RAM may help with performance also.