Ssurgul

Robocopy: an actually useful *gasp* tool built into Windows Vista/7 for copying/mirroring files and/or directories. With the /dcopy:T flag used, it copies the files with the original date/time stamps as well. http://superuser.com/questions/146125/how-to-preserve-file-attributes-when-one-copies-files-in-windows and http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

Creating a RAMDisk to hold various temp/cache files. (Not as useful as when I finally get the mega-computer together of a Core i7 on the 2011 platform, with up to 64GB of RAM, but even at 16GB a 4GB RAMDrive will help somewhat.)

Create: http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/19205-how-make-ram-drive-win7-64-a.html

Recreate at bootup: http://reboot.pro/7789/

Moving Firefox Temporary Internet files: http://www.infohole.com/blog/computing/firefox-cache-location/

Finding the hard drive slaughtering process. How to determine which process(es) are filling up your hard drive queue with requests and operations and such.

http://tweaks.com/windows/39199/how-to-detect-what-process-is-thrashing-your-hard-drive/