I know everyone and their brother has blogged on this, but I have been playing with the Orcas March CTP (comes as a VPC) and I wanted to know how to speed it up. Scott Hanselman comes to the rescue again with some great advice. What was unclear to me was whether a USB2 Harddrive would perform better than having the VPC on the same physical disk as my OS...the answer is a resounding "YES".
I also compacted the VHD and merged it into a new non-differencing disk for added performance. As of now it is flying with only 768 Megs of memory.
Very recommended...
