I have noticed my tower is getting slower, especially at start-up. Is there any built-in tool I can use or download?

Thanks!

No there is no tool to speed up Linux. There are no disk defragmenters. There are a few areas that you can look at to speed up a Linux machine.

You can use a less demanding GUI environment. Instead of using Gnome or KDE you could use something like XFCE.

If your machine has less than 512 MB RAM you could add RAM.

If your disk drive partition(s) is/are nearly full you could delete some files to make space or get a bigger disk drive.

If your disk drive is starting to fail you could replace it with a fast disk drive.

If your system is low on RAM you might try to get rid of processes that you don't use such as smbd and nmbd and sshd etc. That is, if you don't use them.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be worth it to go back to a v1.2 Linux kernel. It seems like that version of Linux ran really fast on 300 MHz CPUs.

Other than that I don't believe that there is much you can do. I've read several of the books on performance tuning Linux. They are full of s**t.

Maybe he has a bunch of services going at startup? Maybe look into disabling a few that he doesn't need.