This morning I found some tips on how to improve Vista's performance. The downfall to doing this is losing "Vista features". If you disable "Windows Search" and "Superfetch" services you will see a performance boost. (Not huge but it helps) This also will decrease the amount of system cache being used by the OS.

The third improvement comes by way of a utility that I discovered on Code Plex which is a Microsoft site that is similar to Source Forge. The utility is call Vista Battery. This utility is designed for computers with batteries i.e. laptops. When your laptop starts to run on battery the utility will disable Windows Aero and Windows Sidebar. This will help improve the overall battery life of your laptop. I would expect an improvement to the power management of Vista in SP1 but this utility will work just fine for now.