Hard Disk Space Usage

I am at a trying to figure out how to retrieve some of my hard disk space as my Powerbook G4 with an 80 GB HD is now running painfully slow.I remember reading that Apple recommends keeping 20% of your disk space free for best performance and there is no doubt that since I dropped below 20 GB of free space the performance has been noticeably worse with many many more spinning rainbow balls. The Finder shows that I have 15.97 GB available.
I have looked at the Finder and done a ⌘-I (Get Info) for each item listed.
Desktop: 984 KB
[My Home Folder]: 24.66 GB
Applications: 4.41 GB
Documents: 386.2 MB
Movies: 3.96 GB
Music: 13.14 GB
Pictures: 5.04 GB
Within this I looked at Library Info: 2.14 GB and Mail info: 1.38 GB. Clearly there is a lot of overlap since Movies, Music and Pictures are all under [My Home Folder]. I have only loaded about 30% of my CDs into iTunes so as you can imagine I am concerned that if I add more I'll have no space left. It seems silly to have an iPod that has a 60 GB capacity yet my hard disk clearly does not allow for that much music (I do not have any desire to use my iPod as a calendar or address book - it is a music device) and with the system software etc I know that there is a big imbalance.
Any ideas? I've also noticed that mail has suddenly slowed down massively. I do not delete emails so that could be hoarding disk space I suppose.

I only have 512mb ram and my computer works fine although it is always better to have more. An external hard drive such as Lacie is also a great bet - I just purchased a 300 GB drive and its the biz.
I would suggest that you download whatsize from versiontracker - its free software that tell you exactly what you have on your computer in a table columned format - its brilliant and it lets you delete whatever you dont need within the software.

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