I like the Aero interface but I always revert to classic windows and turn everything off except like screen font smoothing, mouse cursor shadow, windows shadow, translucent selection, etc.. Also, when using Photoshop with a tablet I always turn off the Tablet PC service and just make sure the wacom service is running. ALSO.. (pheww), Photoshop has the OpenGL acceleration support (for CS4) and if you turn off 3D interaction acceleration and under advanced drawing turn off use for image display ALONG with having the classic windows interface you will experience maximum draw perfomance all this assuming you have a decent video card! Alternatively you can turn off OpenGL support entirely and that has even faster draw rates but you get the slow zoom and pan. Anyway, I turn off System Restore, Indexing, all the advanced options mentioned before, I have Diskeeper Pro installed (awesome program), NOD32 (64bit)... and my sound card (Xfi) and that's it. My machine is pretty much not going to do much better and for now it's all I need. And, that's that.