Folks I was bemuzed while reading a so called Vista Optimisation "guide". I think this "guide" was written by a 13 year old who uses his computer to play games and wanted to do "leet stuffz" with his Vista install. I was suprised that a fairly major website backed it, and then a number started linking to it.
Disabling services, fiddling with page file settings, turning off UAC and similar things never did much at all for actually improving performance and certain does alot to weaken the operating system. I keep Vista at defaults, and change deliberate things such as the following:
1. Secpol.msc edits for account lockout, not remembering last logon, enforcing ctrl-alt-del on logon, making UAC deny for users, making UAC prompt for credentials for admins, change logging of security policy events to enabled
2. Bitlocker with tpm / pin / usb key (requires sp1 on ms connect though)
3. gpedit.msc to enable IE7 cipher strength of aes 256 bit default for all tls sessions instead of 128 which is default in Vista
4. Enabled IE7 memory protection, no ssl to disk, tls only no sslv3 or sslv2
5. Enable signing policy to only install signed software
6. Disable all hidden shares such as C$ and ADMIN$
There might be other things I have forgotten but I think thats more or less standard stuff I do post install.