Windows Vista is heavy. My recollection is that a new install requires about 2 or 3 times more disk space than a fresh Windows XP installation. And, it seems really slow on hardware with good specs (Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, dedicated graphics RAM, etc.). Even copying a file from my notebook to a Samba share seems to take much much longer than from an XP PC to the same Samba share. So, I was very interested to read about...

vLite 1.1. Final

...which is supposed to let you reconfigure Vista's installation before actually installing Windows Vista. This seems like an interesting option to take before installing Vista as a Guest OS under Virtual PC/Virtual Server, VMware, or Parallels. If you've already tried it, please let me know how it worked for you. Thanks!