in the last few months, my laptop performance has slllloooooowwwweeeed down to a place where it is painful. booting up takes 15 minutes. getting outlook up and running takes another ten. so this morning, i finally decided to take the time to try to clean things up in the hopes that it will help. if it doesn't, i'll try a more drastic approach.
this sounds like a rational plan, but it's currently 10:35, and i started this process of disk cleanup and defragmentation at 10:00, after suffering with my crawling laptop for an hour. defrag is currently at 3% and moving files i've never heard of around on my system. cleanup is at 2% and is compressing old files.
and while this cleanup happens, nothing else is productive. opening this window to type this message took five minutes. outlook never successfully loaded.
so i'm viewing this as an investment for my future, and realizing that i can do little work until this machine is once again functional.