Slow Down......

[Eddie G. O'Connor Jr.]

Hello all,
I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I have an IBM 
Thinkpad, and it's running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Recently I've been noticing 
it's been slower & slower  when it's time for startup and shutdown. It 
seems as though the purple splash screen just stares back at me when I 
start it up, and when I shut it down it takes forever for the little 
dots under the splash name take a really long time to change colors and 
then shut off. Is there something I can do to reverse this?...or to 
eliminate it altogether? A friend of mine recently had me install 
something called "BleachBit" telling me it was like the defragmenter in 
Windows.....but even after installing it and running it my machine still 
seems a lot slower than when I first started using it. If anyone can 
help it would be greatly appreciated.

Add'tl Info:

4 GB Memory
320 GB SATS Hard Drive
Installed:
LibreOffice - ClamAV - BleachBit - eMacs - most of the other programs 
came installed already, and since the machine was fast then I would 
imagine it has something to do with one of the installed programs?....I 
dunno just shootin blanks in the dark here!

Cheers!


EGO II