How to make your harddrive suck less hard...

Here we go - this is what I would tell you to do to increase harddrive performance:

Don't use the Recycle Bin
Set the amount of harddrive space allocated to the Recycle Bin to zero. For my own account I must say that it is very seldom that I accidently delete something which is urgently needed (if ever). If you have your sourcecontrol system set up correctly and doesn't work on anything which isn't properly backed up every night - why should you have your harddrive cluttered with files you don't want, you don't need and you won't miss, even if they were gone?

Get yourself a RAM-drive
For a few bucks you can get a license for XtraTools 2007. With this fabulous product you get a number of extremely useful tools for various computer maintenance tasks bundled in a single pack - and one of these tools are RAMDrive which enables you to set up a dedicated drive on your machine which only lives in memory. If you have i.e. 200 MB of memory which you never use anyway you can gain a lot of performance by creating a RAM-drive and point your enviromental variable %TMP% and %TEMP% to this drive. The beauty of this system is simple - because the files only live in memory they are gone once you reboot your computer. Sweeeeeet........ Also you should point your Temporary Internet Files to this drive for the same reason. Unless you are surfing on an oldschool 56Kbs modem connection you should never feel any delays when browsing through pages.

Defragment your harddrive often
You should use the SysInternals Power Defragmenter (a console app wrapped in a nice little GUI) for defragmenting the files on your harddrive. It takes a while to run and consumes quite a lot of CPU when it runs but you get a true boost in performance once all your DLL's in C:\Windows have been defragmented properly. No shit, Sherlock - I gained some 20+ seconds in reboot time once I had my entire C-drive defragmented. Run it once or twice a week on the files you use often - C-drive, your source repository, your Office files etc.