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to elaborate on what phalanx said, things run slwoer because even though browsing through explorer, two files a program uses appear to be sitting right next to each other, in reality, they can be scattered about the physical hard drive, making the program work harder, since the operating system has to skip back and forth to run the program.
think of your hard drive as a book, and the files are all pages. A fragmented drive will have pages scattered all over the place. So say you are trying to read chapter 2, and you have to go to page 3, then 33, then 400, then 10, then 1000, then back to 11... you get the idea. Defragging makes it so chapter 3 is normal, you go from ,say, page 20, to 21 to 22 to 23, etc.
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