A few other performance tips, while I'm geeking out. During the development of Groove 2.1 (coming soon!), one of the things that we were concentrating on was reduction of disk fragmentation through work in our XML object store. (It's awesome. Make sure that you defrag your disk after you've installed 2.1, for a clean start.)
One of the things that we noticed during the process was that you can reduce fragmentation if, in Internet Explorer, you use Tools / Internet Options… / Advanced /Security, and make sure that “Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed” is unchecked. A performance vs. privacy issue, to be sure. Oh, and I also noticed that it also helps performance if you get 1GB of memory for your laptop and turn off virtual memory
Finally, I should mention that if you're a database engineer and are truly into I/O performance, you should check out a couple of papers that I found quite some time ago when exploring the works of one of my personal heroes of the database and transaction world, Turing Award recipient Jim Gray – this on Win2K and NT4. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]