I've been fooling around with large video files, lately, and came fairly close to filling up my 300 gb drive on my laptop. I'd noticed, too, that my laptop had been running poorly -- slow to boot up, slow to shut down, slow to load and run programs, programs stalling, etc. I assumed it was because I recently loaded a bunch of new video software (I'm trying to get my laptop to play ripped Blu-Ray disks from the hard drive).

Well, last night I decided to do a little maintenance. I deleted a bunch of the ripped Blu-Ray videos and other accumulated junk and then defragged the drive. My free space went from about 40 gig (a little over 10%) to 190 gig.

Well, lo and behold -- this morning I booted it up and it went like lightening. Everything is nice and perky again with no performance anomalies.

So, two suggestions to keep a Vista machine healthy and happy:

1. Watch your hard drive free space. If you're getting too full, delete some files and make some room.

2. De-frag regularly. I don't care what Microsoft says about auto defragging. I use the free Aulogics program, it didn't take all that long on my rather large hard drive, and the performance difference is stunning.