Windows Vista - 12 Tips To Boost Your PC's Performance

The two articles below provide excellent advice on how to improve sluggish performance issues with Windows Vista, as it's a different environment than Windows XP

Windows Vista - 12 Tips To Boost Your PC's Performance
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204701251

QUOTE: Soon after Windows Vista came out, many suggestions for tweaking the operating system to improve performance emerged. Unfortunately, most of those tweaks turned out to be pretty disappointing: they either provided the illusion of better performance but did nothing of substance, or they were rehashes of existing Windows XP tips that might not even be valid on Vista.
 
Still, there are plenty of things that can be done to make Vista run better. Over the past several months I've kept an eye peeled as to what actually works, what doesn't, and why. With less work than you might think, it's entirely possible to have Vista running quite snappily.
 
SUMMARY OF VISTA TUNING RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Add more memory (esp. when you buy a new system - 2GB or more)
2. Find Out What's Hogging Your System (analyze impacts to performance)
3. Get Rid Of Anything You Don't Need (start-ups)
4. Tune The Vista Search Index (turn off if you don't use it)
5. Tune System Restore (once per week instead of daily if space is limited)
6. Use A Second Hard Drive To Parallelize Operations
7. Tune Defrag, But Not To Excess
8. Try ReadyBoost, But Don't Throw A Lot Of Money At It (USB Flash drives for caching might help)
9. Install Your Updates (e.g., 938194, 938979, and 941649, which should be installed in that order, and thie will be included eventually in SP1 when available later this year)
10. Check For Other Driver Updates
11. Tune Windows Defender
12. Turn off some of the "Eye Candy" (e.g., Aero flying-windows affects)

Below is also another good thread that shares tips for improving Vista performance:

CNET Forums - Tips on improving Vista performance
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-10149_102-0.html?forumID=7&threadID=275745