When I first working on using Windows Vista, the new GUI has astonished me with its new look but over time, I'd rather have better performance over enhanced interface. I'll post up some tips here that I have learned since Vista was the pre-installed operating system on both the laptops that I use. I do these measures now as a habit whenever I have a fresh installed OS. If you're looking to improve your computer's performance, look no further.
1. Disable transparency. When using Aero as the theme, the transparency adds as a layer of enhancement to the interface and eliminating this feature will give you a flatter feel to the system.
2. Switch the theme setting to Windows Classic. This will get rid of the whole Vista Aero effect, so if you like the Vista GUI, you can leave this out. I have this one as optional because the purpose of switching to Vista anyways is it's enhanced interface.
3. If you have a thumb drive that has plenty of capacity, you can significantly increase your computer's speed by enabling "Ready boost". This works great if you have a big capacity thumb drive, and you can use this is as an extra memory (RAM) to cache since Vista is a memory hogger to render it's advanced GUI. This is probably the greatest feature that I have discovered thus far after switching to Vista. My system's base score went up from 3.1 to 4.0 just by doing this.
4. Eliminate start up programs. You can do this through MSCONFIG, and as well as going to your start up folder where it has shortcuts to programs. Eliminating the programs that doesn't need to be opened up during start up will speed up the boot up time.
5. Switch to 'high performance' power plan. via the control panel.
Hope this helps.
- Dennis