Make space on and speed up your Mac?

Well, I don't believe my MacBook 2.26 GHz late 2009 is particularly slow but I came across this thread in Quora, particularly the post by Andrea Eldridge, and tried out some of the recommendations.
I was certainly intrigued by the claim that I was going to be shocked at how much faster my computer would run.
Following the link in Andrea's post I reduced my startup apps from 10 to 5, removed 5 of the 12 widgets in my dashboard (which I do use a lot) and finally downloaded Monolingual and removed all but 5 languages from my machine, thereby saving 1.9GB in space.
Was I shocked at how much faster the Mac ran?
Well, no. Indeed, I really didn't notice any significant difference either in boot time or how sprightly it performed when doing usual tasks.