1. There are various startup managers that will let you see what utilities are booting and let you stop unneeded ones from booting. I use "Absolute Startup" but there are many other good ones.
2. I have not seen disk usage mentioned. Even after all the cleanup above, you should have at least 10 percent or so, or more, of your hard disk as free space. Otherwise, your disk spends too much time thrashing trying to allocate your data to sectors.