>>>You're right about the speed and memory. The best way to improve Vista and VM performance is more RAM.
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>>I've got 4 Gb and rarely go over 50% usage - so I think I'm comfortable
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>>The problem is disk I/O. Is it Vista or my disk ? Dunno but I suspect Vista. Next time I'll go for a 7200 rpm but that only improves the search time
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>That is one of my other major peeves about Vista. On every machine I work with that has Vista on it, the disk drive (at least the system disk) is working almost nonstop always. The machine can be sitting idle (user interface wise anyway) overnight with no screen saver and the drive activity goes on and on and on...

One of those things is the indexing service - which I have turned off for all my drives

System startup takes its time. One of the things it does it look whether there are any new updates available
So, in the morning I turn it on, enter my userid + passwd and go fetch a coffee

My computer's on for 10 min now and the disc is still working heavily

A good thing about vista is that you can take a full system backup (I do it for the C: drive) to a usb drive (or CD/dvd). In case any update/install goes wrong you can boot from CD and do a full system restore of the C: (that is the full C: partition)

Vista's nice once you get used to it - it still has a couple of annoyances - but we do not live in a perfect world