Choose the drive where you want the file to be. Keeping it on separate drives is better for performance, as you don't have to tax the drive moving data to the swap file while at the same time pulling data off the drive at another location. This should help out your computer's performance a lot. This will give you a list of the applications that are running. To improve performance, shut down any programs that you don't think you need running.
Fragmented drives are slow and messy.
Have the maintenance programs run at night, or at a time when you won't be using your computer. If you have a choice, it's almost always better to spend more money on RAM than on processor speed. A P166 with 128 megabytes of RAM will blow the doors off of a P233 with only 32megs. Get yourself lots of ram, even if it doesn't seem like a practical amount. While these are great benefits, they can lead to a stuffed hard drive.