I like Windows Vista - it's a cool and stable OS. But it's taken me a while to get it to boot fast, and stop thrashing my disks to death. Windows Search, automatically scheduled items like Disk Defragmenter and Windows Defender and the biggest culprit - Superfetch, all put a heavy load on boot time and run time disk activity.

I tend to keep things pretty well organised and never really needed a desktop search engine and so I disabled Windows Search (the search feature on the start menu will still find program menu items - which is incredibly useful). I don't mind waiting a second or two for an app to load either and usually leave my frequently used apps running anyway - and so don't really want SuperFetch creating the 300,000 plus I/O events it records at system startup (watch it using Process Monitor from SysInternals). I also keep all my data on a separate volume from the OS - and so will manual defrag the OS disk once every couple of months. And I use the Complete PC Back up feature of Vista Busines/Ultimate to image the OS volume - giving me my own restore points - so I turn off restore points as well (Acronis True Image would be another good choice).

Here's a great article that just about covers it all on how to tune-down your Vista setup so that boot times and disk activity return to normal - Beginners Guides: Stopping Vista From Thrashing Hard Disks to Death.

Lone blogger 1 - Windows Vista 0