I'm not aware of any shortcuts to check if all packages are working properly. You might find some errors in the logs relating to any that aren't working properly.
For speed, you could make sure that you have the optimum size in place for your SWAP partition. You could also see about optimizing your system memory. This
HowTo is for Gentoo, but the same principals apply to other distributions.
Also consider shutting down any unused/unneeded services, and of course delete any unneeded files and packages caches.