I just stumbled across the Intel Capabilities Forum for the first time. Some really nice stuff there if you’re interested in performance testing of PCs. I like their test scripts and input files to evaluate PC platforms using real-world applications, and thought their post on best practices for benchmarking Windows Vista had lots of good ideas in it.
The forums are awfully quiet, though.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I don’t know about these automated benchmark scripts and how Vista compares to XP. What I do know is that my Vista machine seems to thrash the disk quite a lot. I can’t figure out why. And it’s a brand new computer. All this disk access may not affect how Vista performs on these automated benchmarks, but it certainly does affect my own productivity. That constant disk sound is annoying as heck! It makes it hard to concentrate on my work. (It’s kind of reminiscent of the ambient noise the Xbox 360 emits which makes it unsuitable for certain parts of the house.) I hope Microsoft does something to make Vista perform better on the Ambient Noise benchmark and the related Customer Sanity and Happiness benchmark.
Jojo, have you looked in Reliability and Performance Monitor to see what is accessing the disk?
Thanks, Ed. I didn’t even know I had a Reliability and Performance Monitor. Next time I will pull it up and see if I can figure this out.
Jojo, offhand, I’d say the indexing service is probably working overtime — you might want to set it up so it only indexes the files you want. But the R&PM should give you a hint as to what’s up.