UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm running Solaris 8 on a Sun ULTRA 5(SPARC II CPU, 270 MHz) with 64 Mb of RAM.
The machine is very, very slow even doing normal tasks such as reading mail....... I'm nearly afraid to ask it to do some real work.......

On checking out the machine(which I only received last week from our IT dept), I find that the /client_local/ file system is 87% full. On further investigation of this, I find that this 87% usage is made up of files & software packages that the previous user had. I know these files are not needed anymore, so my main question is this : If I clean up the /client_local/ file system, is there any guarantee that I will see any improvement in my workstations performance?

Why dont I remove these files now and see??? The answer is that I dont have the necessary permissions to remove the items in question and my department will be charged a fairly high fee by the IT dept just for a simple '\rm -Rf *' command. So I dont want to incur a cost if there isnt a good chance of my situation being improved......

I don't see how more disk space would help your performance.