While, in general, the space used on the hard drive does not affect computer speed, there are specific cases where it might.

1. Windows does use the hard disk as a kind of secondary memory when your physical RAM gets used up. The paging file is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM. The amount of hard disk space usually used by the paging file is upto about twice your physical RAM.

2. After a lot of installing, uninstalling, deleting and creating of files, the drive tends to get fragmented. (Picture a book that’s come unbound and the pages are all out of order) Defragmenting the drives will improve performance.

3.Age of a hard drive can also have an effect on speed. It’s one of the few mechanical parts of your computer with plates that spin and read/write heads that move back and forth. As parts of these plates become unusable, it uses “spare” locations to make up for it. All of those mechanical parts can begin to fail, which can in turn affect performance.

It is much more likely that the performance of your comp is affected by unnecessary items loaded at start up or other processes running in the background that you don’t know about (malware/viruses/etc). Contact us and we’ll be happy to help.