Vista definitely runs better on systems with more than one CPU core. However, everything related to disk I/O operations --IS-- slower on Vista than it is on all other flavours of Windows. This is one of the things they promised to fix with SP1.
Try turning off indexing services and Windows Defender. You can also look and try if this sort-of-backup-and-versioning-system that is now integrated in the file system can be turned off; don't know what it's called, right now I am not sitting in front of a Vista machine.
Try turning off indexing services and Windows Defender. You can also look and try if this sort-of-backup-and-versioning-system that is now integrated in the file system can be turned off; don't know what it's called, right now I am not sitting in front of a Vista machine.