Vista running like shit on not-so-shitty computer

I've got my (legal) copy of Vista RC1 up and running with Aero and all the bells and whistles on. It actually runs fine most of the time. Its a bit slower than XP but thats to be expected (it actually installs in about the same time or less). But I've been having some problems. Vista is always accessing my harddrive like 80% of the time even when I'm not running anything. The RAM meter says that I'm using about 50-60% of my 896MB RAM at idle (my builtin GeForce 6100 takes 128MB). Occasionally, however, it just slows down to a painstaking crawl. I know that I'm running it with everything on and I know its a complete resource hog, but I refuse to believe that it needs to access the page file when I launch IE. This only happens occasionally. What do you guys think might be the problem? Do you think its because this isn't the final and its a bug? I tried turning Aero off but that only frees up 3% of RAM max, so i doubt its that. Any ideas? Here's my system:

Athlon X2 3800 (AM2)
1GB Centon DDR2 533 RAM (128MB to builtin GeForce 6100)
160GB Seagate SATA2 HD 7200.9

Sorry if this a long-winded post, I tend to get carried away.

My rating is a lowly 2.4, and surprisingly, thats due to my GeForce 6100, not my RAM. I know that the GeForce 6100 is no good for gaming, but it should handle Aero with ease.

About your question: did you install a version of Vista that has Aero included? If so, you can enable it by going to Personalize>Window Color and Appearance>Classic settings>Windows Aero.

I'm fairly certain its the memrory... I think Vista is taking up 800-900MB for itself, leaving almost nothing for the applications. Although, task manager lists about 400MB of RAM as "cached". I have no idea what that means.

spyware or virus? check them!