The obviously non-obvious performance tweak for Vista and Longhorn virtual machines

Vista and Longhorn Power Options default to 'Balanced' which is normally fine for most VM platforms. If you have laggy/slow VM performance of Vista or Longhorn, set your Power Options to 'High Performance' and see if it makes a difference.

I find myself forgetting this from time to time but it becomes particularly important if you are using VMWare 6.0 and report your battery status on your laptop to your virtual machines. I like reporting battery information to the virtual machines just in case I am running on battery and about to lose power. VMs will gracefully shutdown before my host machine because I crank up the power percentage that triggers a system shutdown inside my VMs.

For most desktop computers, this won't make much of a difference, but I find it essential for laptops.

I love the secondary bay battery on my Thinkpad T60. Unless I absolutely need a DVD burner at the moment, I leave the secondary bay battery installed. It also saves battery power because there isn't a CD/DVD rotor motor spinning up anytime a 'File Open' dialog box triggers.

Also noteworthy: If your system has hardware based virtualization support (Intel VT or AMD-V), make sure to enable it on any VM platform that has it available. It becomes particularly handy when doing the initial install of any VM before you can install any VM client tools.