...if you are not too crazy about Vista's Aero look, or have gotten tired of it and don't mind the 'classic' look, you can turn off most or all of the options. This will result in a 'snappier' Vista experience, albeit without the cool eye candy. I also turned off the sidebar, since I never really used it much anyway.
I noticed quite a difference on my laptop running Vista Business Edition.
Here's the options I kept (To get to this dialog box, I find it easiest to right click 'Computer'> Properties>Advanced System Settings):
(https://www.landzdown.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi50.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ff330%2Fxrayjames%2Fvista_tweak1.jpg&hash=470b6d07fb45a5beea9d0178c8963936c4b21f8a) (https://www.landzdown.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi50.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Ff330%2Fxrayjames%2Fvista_tweak2.jpg&hash=7622654e8ecdb6d2e603a9f0835058aa07080317)
good tip.
fortunately for me... my lappy has almost enough ram and cpu to keep up with vista!