Despite all the bad press Vista has gotten, I went ahead and put Vista Ultimate on my Thinkpad T43p. I was fairly optimistic since I ran the Release Candidates late last year and they functioned smoothly with no major driver issues.
Vista booted up smoothly, albeit very slowly on the 2GHz Celeron 1gig RAM, 5400rpm/80gig system. As I started getting myself up and running on the new OS, the first thing I did was disable UAC. It's too much of a pain in the ass when you have to click through 3 dialog boxes simply to install Firefox. I understand the point of UAC, but honestly, I know what I'm doing and I don't feel that it's a necessity for me.
The next thing I did was to modify the indexing (Orb-->Indexing Options). By default, Vista wants to keep an index of all the files in my Start Menu, as well as everything in my Users folder. While I do like the idea of keeping an index of my files for easy access, I modified the settings so that only my Start Menu and Desktop are indexed. This knocked my index size down from several thousand to ~500. Why do this? Well, the simple fact is that my hard drive is just too slow to maintain an index of my constantly changing User's folder. Full-fledged indexing works great on my friend's T60 with a 7200rpm drive, but it's too much of a drag on my system.
I've disabled a few more non-essential processes, but the indexing has made the biggest difference to the overall system performance on this slower system. Overall, Vista seems to be running well on here, especially since I took the plunge and upgraded my system to 2 gigs of RAM last week :)
More on Vista stuff later
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