I have a three year old home PC with an Intel Celeron 2.00 GHz processor and running XP Professional Service Pack 2. It has became really slooooow in the past few days. Need some help speeding it back up. It's got a 40 GB hard drive and 31 GB are used and only 6 GB are free space. Could this be the problem?

Here is what I've done:
1. Emptied recycle bin
2. Emptied Deleted Items folder in Outlook
3. Deleted cookies and Temp internet Files in IE
4. Run Spybot and Ad Aware spy scans and "fixed" what they found
5. Inquired on Disk Clean Up. It says I can free up almost 10 GB by electing to compress files. I have no idea what the impact of compressing files would be. Should I do it?
6. Should I use the Disk Defragmenter tool? I used it on a previous home PC running Windows ME and ran into serious problems.

Any tips or pointers to good step by step tutorials to speed up this box without screwing it up?

TIA

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