Tech Tid bits
Dear  [Mentat],
Good deal on the money order. I’ll look for it. [He's paying me for the network card I ordered for him a couple weeks earlier.]
Yes, checks are rather antiquated in this age of electronic banking. But they still serve a useful purpose – they make it harder to steal someone’s identity. 
If you run the system maintenance tasks every one to three days, then, yes, your hard drive will be defragmented and rearranged so that the programs START executing faster, when loaded. This may be contributing to the faster operation that you are observing. And, as you indicate, you’ve probably gotten used to the slow-downs and so they are less noticeable today.
Enjoy your week, and will talk to you again soon.
Tom