A common complaint of users who have just installed Vista is that the disk starts churning endlessly. Any kind of frequent disk access on the same volume on which you have stored samples or audio content can cause major problems with recording and playback — even worse if you’re using disk-intensive software like samplers or Ableton Live.

These problems aren’t entirely unique to Vista, but disk indexing seems expanded in Vista and both may be more aggressive — particularly if you’ve just installed an update.

1. Turn off Disk Indexing

Disk indexing allows Vista to search files automatically. It’s a nice feature in theory, but as with tools like Google Desktop, I prefer not to have background services doing this sort of thing while I’m working. In audio testing, I found indexing would continue even as I was performing other tasks — bad. (Yes, theoretically one of the touted features of Vista was that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen, but it does. The scheduling service that is included with Vista requires app-by-app support on the audio end in order to prioritize audio, and it doesn’t seem to shut off things like disk indexing.)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend upgrading to Vista at this time, because too many drivers are missing (hello, M-Audio), many applications still need updates, and, most importantly, graphics drivers seem still to be in flux, performing unreliably, slowly, or both (hello, NVIDIA and ATI).

But there are reasons to upgrade, as long as Vista isn’t the only bootable OS on your only system. Multiple systems? New computer pre-installed with Vista? Dual-boot setup? Give it a try. People love to slam early adopters, but I actually like adopting early on a non-critical system, because it means when that machine is ready for a project, I won’t be troubleshooting anything.

Now, the beginning of the bad news. Out of the box, I’ve already found significant issues that can make a system slow to a crawl, and was able to confirm some of these issues with others. Fortunately, I did find some fixes; I hope to find more performance enhancements, but these will definitely get you started by eliminating the bigger bottlenecks. And some of them are reminiscent of similar situations on XP.

Disclaimers: Vista is new. Your mileage may vary. And I’m not done; part of the reason I’m glad to do this on the Web is to get some of your feedback, and update these tips over time.

But let’s start with the easy one: fixing Aero.