Not really true, I run Vista Ultimate 32-bit on my little netbook all of the time, it has 1 gig of memory and I use an SDHC 4 gig card.
You just don't have your vista optimized properly.. You can turn off search indexing really easy.
Here are two ways:
Navigate to Control Panel/System and Maintenance/Indexing Options. There you can remove all locations or only those you use rarely.
It is also possible to disable indexing for a certain drive or enable it only for selected folders. You can do this by changing the Properties of a drive or folder (right click on drive letter in Windows Explorer).
The fasted way is to simply disable the Windows Search service. Run Services (just type “Services” at the Start Search bar), right click on the Windows Search service and select “Properties”. Then choose “Disabled” for the start type. Afterwards, you have to stop this service by right clicking on it and selecting “Stop”.
The first option is the one you will quite often find on the Web. But I found out that Windows Search remains active after disabling it this way. The second option works, however, it takes quite long time until all files in all subfolders have been excluded from indexing. Thus, the third option is the best one. You don’t have to reboot, as with the first option, and if your want to enable it again later, it will cost you just a couple of mouse clicks.
After initial indexing I turn this feature off and make sure on the services control panel that I have it set as not an autostarting service.
Every computer I have besides the netbook is running Vista X64 which has none of the limitations of memory, or anything else. I suggest if you have a machine running 32-bit vista that you go out and buy a high speed USB memory stick that's at least 4 gigs in size. They end up costing from $20-40. Plug in it and choose READYBOOST on the autorun pop-up when it show up (If you have a SANDISK you might have to reformat the USB stick to make this option available).. You'll see a boost in speed there too..
An option I already mentioned besides turning off the search indexer is also turning off automatic windows defender scanning and turn off automatic windows updating.
All of these are user setable options. Your idea of performance max doesn't mention you have ran Tweak VI (totalidea.com) which will let you reorganize memory back to the way the old NT and Vista organized it and it will also let you set the pre-fetching and superfetching options whichs tries to smartly pre-load applications it thinks you will try to run so they appear to load faster. This also takes up valuable memory..
In your case I recommend three things and you'll see better performance:
1) Tweak VI
2) A high speed USB Memory Stick for ReadyBoost
3) Turning off the Search Indexer when it's completed initial indexing..
64 bit Vista has none of the things you are having issues about and it supports much larger memory footprints but requires you to have a 64 bit cpu which nearly three years after it's release are cheap and affordable.
In todays world, I buy an 8 gig memory SDHC card for $20 a pop, and a processor/OS combined with hardware that only supports 4GB is quite OLD WORLD..
