I stumbled upon some ideas yesterday to optimize Vista performance — with a focus of running it on UMPCs. Reading through this thread here, I got the impression that my laptop could very well benefit from the same approach, seeing as the performance of hard drives in laptops is not sensational, if perhaps a little better than in UMPCs.
Anyway, I applied the changes to switch off SuperFetch and to change the DisablePagingExecutive setting (whatever exactly that does), and the result is great: I get loads less disk activity overall, which is great because disc activity was always something that slowed down the system quite a lot, and I don’t get that funny effect where you return to your computer after a while and it seems to have paged out half the applications that you were working with. Everything is a lot more responsive so far, so I like it a lot. My system is a 2GB Sony laptop and I’m using a 2GB ReadyBoost drive as well — which is still being used, contrary to what somebody on the thread suggests — so I guess your mileage may vary if your setup is significantly different. In any case I’ve only used the changes for a day so far, will keep you posted if I have anything new.