Aside from increasing the main memory on your laptop, the next best thing you can do is to replace your 2.5" hard disk drive with SSD (Solid State Drives). However, SSD are very expensive - typically 3 or 4 times the cost of ordinary 2.5" hard disk drives. They are also limited in terms of storage size (64gb, 128gb and 256gb).
Now comes the Seagate Momentus Hybrid Drives.
They are essentially 2.5" harddisk drives, but come with a 4gb SSD acting as a super fast cache! Capacities go from 250gb all the way to 500gb! See the Seagate Momentus XT Benchmark results