I've had some speed issues with my laptop of late. Nothing major, but I've been putting it down to an overly large swap file. But despite a 1/2 gig swap doesn't seem that excessive, particularly for a Windows box, I put it down to "just one of those things," and moved some more of my ever-increasing download collection to another partition.
One of these downloads, however, was Sequoia. This is a disk usage utility which shows graphically where all the space on your harddrive has been used. It was also one of the many download utilities I hadn't gotten around to installing yet. Upon doing so, I found the cause of my slowdown... a 1.4 GB (yes, gigabytes) logfile in the middle of my eDonkey program files directory! This had caused my drive to overfill, and thereby limit the size to which my swap could grow.
I deleted the file, and defragged the harddrive. Whoosh! Not only the sound of my deadlines as they pass me by, but also the speed of my newly invigorated laptop.