It's disappointing that we need to go so far "under the hood" of Windows Vista to simply give it the same performance as its predecessor, Windows XP. Given that sales of XP will be ending June 30th, 2008, however, it's time that we all face the inevitable and deal with the myriad issues still plaguing Vista.
A good start can be found here. This article gives a number of ways to improve Vista performance, and includes links to some interesting free Vista downloads (a tweaker's paradise) as well as video on how to improve Vista boot time (a personal bugbear for me). This article from TechRepublic digs down a bit deeper, and shows you how to modify startup programs, search indices, and disk defragmentation, to name a few.
These should be a good start in making Vista a more "useable" operating system than it typically is out-of-the-box. Google, as always, is an indispensable resource -- trying searching "Vista performance tweaks."
