I ran across an interesting article today titled Useful Vista Tweaks. As the appropriately titled article suggests, there are about a dozen setting changes you can make in Windows Vista to get better performance/speed out of your system.

The only one I had a problem with was disabling the Windows Search function. I run Outlook 2007 and when I disabled the Windows Search Service, the search function in Outlook stopped working completely. Upon re-enabling the Windows Search Service (and waiting a few minutes for it to do some indexing), the Outlook search starting working again. There may be some other programs which rely on the search service as well, so use caution if you choose to disable it.

Of course, all the points mentioned in the article are optional, so pick and choose as you see fit.