I just deleted 85gb of movies off of my laptop, do you think the performance will be better now? My harddrive: 250GB (5400 RPM) Most of it was full I think but does your hd affect your performance if it's full? Not much of a computer guy so kind of clueless.
Run defrag when you have a few hours to let it churn away at the job. I usually disable the screen saver while doing this as it can interfere on some systems. That should improve peformance a bit. Yes a full drive can affect peformance because the swap file gets smaller and there is less room for temp files.