Use a defragmenting tool - It is possible to defragment disks without a tool, however, it can be just as tedious as defragmenting an MPE system without one. Install only the network protocols you use. Unused protocols can use memory and take CPU time away from the one used. If more than one protocol is used, bind them together. If you have mixed adapter speeds, consider upgrading the slower adapters.
Performance slows when a fast adapter sends data to a slow one.
Performance Tidbits NT uses some ambient CPU resource every second or two for System operation and pinging of network machines. NT makes great use of drive space by using it as virtual memory so the more drive capacity you can get, the better. Paging activity costs more CPU resources and time than having more memory. Disk file compression on NT was created more with performance in mind rather than maximum compression. If you chose to compress files, do it on the smaller, or less-used files.