If you're running NTFS, and you really should be on your system drive, defragmenting is really unlikely to make a performance difference.
Defraging NTFS won't make trem run faster, however depending on how fragmented your drive is, it could greatly improve load times.
Agreed. I tend to measure things in terms of FPS though. Load times don't help too much unless they're SO BAD that you miss warmup, so that's why I didn't mention it. Sorry to make it sound like defragging does NOTHING, when I was just going for that it does nothing for your FPS.
Also, agreed regarding adding more RAM. That's a point I was trying to make too.
Taking care of crapware and those idiotic "helper" utilities is certainly worthwhile. MSConfig helps. Hijackthis is better, if you know what you're doing.
I don't agree with tooling around with Microsoft services. Use MSConfig and check "hide all Microsoft services," then take care of some of the "updater"-types that crept in through that section.
